Name: Irène Mathieu
Major: International Relations
Hometown: Winchester, VA
Service Involvement(s): Student Organization for Medical Outreach & Sustainability (SOMOS), College Partnership for Kids, Community Partnership for Adult Learners. I spent last spring semester in Peru, where I took classes and worked on sustainable development service work with ProWorld Service Corps. I’ve been involved with a few mentoring programs as well.
Favorite Book: This question is tough! But I have to pick Letters to a Young Poet on the basis of its importance and influence in my life right now/in the last few years.
The ramble: In high school, I was not very involved with service, but I was keen on changing that upon starting college. I’m lucky to have ended up at William & Mary, because our rich campus culture of service has stretched my notions of community service and giving back in ways that I could never have anticipated as a high school senior. For me, service has become more than an extracurricular or something to do outside of one’s “real” life and career. For me, service is the basis of my real life and career. The motivation for this comes from a deep-seated belief in the equality of all human beings. But since so many economic and social conditions in this country and around the world fail to reflect that equality, the impetus of my professional life is rectifying it. Service shouldn’t be something we do “on the side;” it should be the culminating action for our mandate, as human beings, to love and care for one another. And since love is what I value above anything else, why shouldn’t my life be based on service? Less abstractly, I think service is a great way for people to learn about real-world conditions all around them, to apply classroom knowledge and to understand how history and economics play out in others’ – and their own - lives. Because of how much I’ve learned about these things since becoming involved in service at William & Mary, I highly encourage peers and those younger than I to get involved in a similar manner. Service broadens our horizons, challenges our definitions, and for me, provides the means with which to live a fulfilling life.