At the beginning of my sophomore year, I was perusing JobX—our student employment platform—hoping to find a job posting that piqued my interest and fit my schedule. I had gone through most of freshman year without a job, focusing on making a successful transition to college life, keeping up with my coursework, and involving myself in a few extracurricular activities. But as sophomore year rolled around, I wanted to find a job that would help me to engage more deeply and meaningfully with more students around campus. A posting for “Inclusive Excellence Fellow” caught my eye. I learned that the Inclusive Excellence Fellows Initiative (IEFI) is a program supporting DEI based student-led projects aimed at improving the inclusivity of Swarthmore’s campus community. Each year, there are approximately ten IEFI projects, each focusing on different ways in which inclusivity can be fostered on campus. After an interview, I became the student fellow for a project called,“Redefining Wellness: The Spirituality Awakening Project”.
As the IEFI Fellow on this project, I worked with two of the campus Religious Advisors (Michael Ramberg and Sabrina Labelle). Together we defined the goal of the project: to find out how students on campus generally define and perceive spirituality and how they feel that the Swarthmore campus climate affects their connection with and expression of their own spirituality. It was very important to me that the information I gathered was representative of the widest possible range of the diverse perspectives of our Swarthmore community; in fact, one of the major goals of this project was to gather information from students who don’t currently engage spiritually on campus. The Interfaith Team was seeking to learn why these students are struggling to find connection and what they would like to see from the Interfaith Center in regards to programming and resources that could help them to increase their spirituality, and ultimately, their well-being. Because the project was in its first year, my main goal was to collect information—first, I had to figure out how to do that effectively. I decided to start with a survey and we worked through several drafts to come up with the most informative questions. Then, I learned that students can’t send out surveys through campus email (you’ll get lots of junk email at Swat, but not surveys). I pivoted to new methods of disseminating my survey and ultimately received 207 responses (about ⅛ of the student population). The information that I collected will provide the groundwork for the Interfaith team to provide spiritual wellness resources and host programs based on student feedback in the future.
In addition to the opportunity to make a small difference in our campus community, being an IE fellow equipped me with skills that will be helpful in my development as a student as well as in my career. In training for this position, I learned about DEI principles from experts in the growing field of inclusive excellence work, and over the course of the year working on my project, I gained experience putting these principles into action. They even brought in counselors from Career Services to talk to us about how the experiences we had as IEFI fellows could benefit us far beyond the endpoint of our project work.
Being an IE fellow turned out to be a meaningful, engaging experience. It was more than “just a job.” As a small cohort of students all working toward inclusivity from different directions, we had an opportunity to support each other, learn from each other, and hopefully have a small positive impact on the wider community.
