Beyond The Classroom

For my Beyond the Classroom Experience, I helped TRiO package their foods for the food drive they
did. We packaged the food on 11/11/2021. Most of the experience was separating the goods into
categories and then filling cardboard boxes. When we filled the cardboard boxes, we had to make sure
every one of them was getting the same number of items so that they wouldn’t become imbalanced.
Overall, most people were extremely helpful and were quick to help separate and help order stuff. I
focused mostly on pastas and then jar foods and I had another person helping me before they had to leave
early. From there we put the foods into the boxes and once we were done with that we were finished! It
only took an hour or so and wasn’t too extensive beyond knowing what to put away where.

I think that the interest of the situation was to help package the donated foods for families
that may not be fortunate enough to have those foods. As someone who has experienced that kind of thing
before, I know what it means to be given food like that. It’s extremely helpful in a lot of ways, as it can
really help out your family when you don’t have anything else. I found that most of the people there were
so beyond determined to help. They weren’t there to mess around, they genuinely wanted to help package
the food. Honestly, it really helped me understand that TRiO is such a good organization that is just trying
to help the community and help the people who come through college. I’m excited for the upcoming
donations and things because I feel like TRiO has such a good way of going about their donations.

This taught me that it’s definitely easier to do things when there’s order and precision. Also,
with more people things get done quicker, especially when those people are all motivated by the same
goals. With the food packaging, everyone kind of understand what we were doing, and I believe that they
all were there to help because they understand the importance of it. For a lot of the packaging, the amount
needed to be precise, so it’s vital to be able to listen and understand what you need to do. I think this
connects to almost everything in your life, as you need to be able to understand and think about what you
need to accomplish. Using critical thinking skills are vital to success and I believe order and precision and
making sure that everything matched helped aid us in thinking critically on what we were putting in each
package. If there were some foods left over that wouldn’t fit precisely with the rest of the packages, they
would end up being donated to the student pantry, which I think is also a neat thing that they’re doing.
They’re helping the community out in more ways than one when they donate to families and when they
donate to the student pantry.

From this experience, I will definitely think about looking into more opportunities into
donating and packaging. While I may not be able to help donate in a huge and substantial way, I can help
with packaging things. And honestly, it was so fun to be able to help and know that what I was doing was
helping people. It was a great little experience that really didn’t take that much time out of my day. I’m
looking forward to being able to do more packaging with TRiO and potentially branching out to working
beyond that! Though, I understand it’ll be difficult, as TRiO was only a small taste of what packaging foods
like that is really like.