VISTA stands for Volunteers in Service to America and is a branch of AmeriCorps. AmeriCorps is comprised of multiple local, state and national programs that are committed to servicing communities for educational, environmental, public safety and health, and homeland security needs. VISTA focuses on combating poverty here in the United States because there are about 46 million American people that live in poverty today.

As a college student here at Central Michigan University, I was naturally inclined to help serve a community on the basis of educational needs. And that’s one of the many benefits of serving as a VISTA Summer Associate.  As a Summer Associate I’ve gotten to work hand in hand with the CMU MI GEAR UP Program. MI GEAR UP stands for Michigan Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs and is a college access program for Pell eligible students. As a GEAR UP alumni and recipient of the GEAR UP Scholarship, I was definitely excited that my VISTA experience would be blended with this program. That’s why I got involved.

This summer our educational goal was to focus on STEM, which stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.  Summer Associates and college student mentors facilitated many classes and workshops centered around this concept. We also got to interact with the students for a wonderful hands-on learning experience. The class that I facilitated was called Rube Goldberg. In this class, students got to build a complex machine made out of a few different simple machines. In the end they were given a simple task to accomplish with the machines that they built. Their tasks were to either turn off a light switch or set off a mousetrap.