By Isaiah Sommers
Isaiah Sommers is a 2012-2013 corps member serving on the Deloitte team at the Irving Middle School in Roslindale.
Photo by Elliot Haney
This time last year, I was handing in my last final of college and was fattening myself up for graduation with barbecues, goodbye parties, and dinners with friends and family. No matter where I went, I was asked, “What are you doing next year?” My answer was easy: I was doing a year of service with City Year in Boston. In reality, this answer barely scratched the surface of what I was really going to do this year.
School was all I had known. What did it mean to no longer be a student? Graduating was like missing the last step at the bottom of a staircase – I was trying to paying attention to what was in front of me, but there was still that horrible lurch in my stomach as I lost balance.
I remember chuckling a little the first time I saw the patch on my City Year bomber, which read: “AmeriCorps: Getting Things Done.” In college, as I read and learned about the world and the different ways we could change it, I was frustrated with how little I felt I was contributing and accomplishing. Then, two weeks into my service year, things were happening all around me. We truly were “getting things done.” Murals painted; lesson plans written; entire parks landscaped in an afternoon; classrooms energized; relationships with students built. Students tasted success and uncovered their potential. And I’m proud to say I had a small hand in all of it.
This new sensation of not simply observing the world, but being part of it—effecting and being affected by my community—is what adulthood means to me. It is this feeling of agency that distinguishes my post-City Year self from who I was a year ago. I have not lost my identity as a student, because every single moment I am learning. My student-idealistic vision matured into something tangible, enduring, and powerfully real. I can finally look down at my AmeriCorps patch and think to myself, “Yeah, I believe it.”
Next year, I will be planning and engaging corporate volunteers and partners in service projects as a senior corps member serving the Civic Engagement Team in City Year Chicago. From there, I envision myself beginning a career in corporate social responsibility, mobilizing large corporations to invest in their communities.
Heading into this graduation, I am still uncertain as to where exactly I want to be and how I will get there, but this time my stomach is calm. I am definitely not ready yet to surrender myself to being a fully-fledged adult. In some ways, I hope to never grow up. But with City Year under my belt, I can carry an adult-sized load, and then some. If and when I leave City Year and head back out into the world, I can do so with the confidence that I am ready for anything it may throw at me and that my potential to make a difference in the world is limitless.
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