Laina Colony

Volunteer Exhibit Guide at Baltimore National Aquarium

(Spring 2014 - March 2019) 

(Gold Experience: Over 500 hours of volunteering)

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As an exhibit guide, one of our main goals is to promote conservation and sustainability of the environment. My main job is to provide information on the exhibits, organisms, and the aquarium itself. Through this I am able to promote conservation and sustainability. Throughout my time volunteering here, I have attended conservation lectures and gone to beach cleanup and restoration days. 

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Managing the nitrogen cycle is a big part of conservation now. It effects many ecosystems, including marine ecosystems. Excess nitrogen can cause algae blooms which can throw an entire ecosystem off balance. During my time at the aquarium I was able to learn about the affects of the Nitrogen cycle on the environment and relay this information to the visitors through activities, talks, and examples. 

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Reflecting on this Experience

This experience has been a major contributor to who I am and what I want to do in my lifetime. I was able to become a better public speaker through this experience, as well as gain perspective on sustainability challenges we as a community face. Through this experience I met many passionate people who share the same interests as I do. This experience gave me enough knowledge of myself to understand what I want to pursue as a career, environmental engineering. I want to pursue systems that will help maintain the beauty in the environments and their natural systems. 

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   Service Learning Objectives

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• Community Engagement: Participate in community action, including campus community, neighborhood/city/state community, national community, global community, and others.​

  • To promote sustainable practices, volunteers participate at local water clean-up and restoration days for the community. ​

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• Civic Engagement: Regard themselves as connected to communities and social groups, and as able to proactively interact with them. Seek ways to make positive change.

  • To promote sustainable practices, volunteers interact with the visitors and the community.

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• Capacity for Reflection: Consider role as social actor, impact on community, and effect of community involvement on self. Seek to strengthen and multiply skills for sustainable social solutions.

  • Throughout my time as a volunteer, I was able to learn what aspects of what I did worked to promote sustainability and which did not. Through my own reflection, I learned which ways were most effective in promoting sustainability for community involvement.

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   Program Wide Objectives

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• Being a team member: Identify strengths and weaknesses of all members of a partnership or collaboration; empower group members to use their strengths, and support weaker team members. Both assign and accept duties and roles intelligently and flexibly.

  • Volunteers have to work in teams for a lot what we do. It is important to understand each others strengths and weaknesses. Some volunteers are better at certain exhibits than others, this is important to recognize. ​

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• Integrity: Identify and be able to elaborate on and justify core beliefs and values; act consistently in accordance with those beliefs and values across contexts; regard themselves as accountable for those actions.

  • Volunteering at the aquarium aloud me to hear many different points of view of many different issues. It was important to me to be able to distinguish my point of view from others while still also listening and respecting the other point of view.

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• Perspectivism: Seek out and fairly consider ethical perspectives and concepts other than own, and ensures these perspectives and concepts appropriately inform their own actions and views.

  • While volunteering, it was very important to think about the way things we were promoting would come across and the best way we could provide the information in an ethical manner.

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• Realistic vision: Be imaginative in thinking about alternatives to the way things are, while being sensitive to the constraints of the real world.

  • Throughout my time volunteering, I got to interact with people from all around the world. Through these interactions, I was able to think about things in alternative ways.

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• Persistence: Confront difficulties resolutely, and persevere in trying to manage them. Reframe failures and mistakes as learning opportunities, and does not allow them to become disabling or discouraging. Follow through on commitments.

  • Working with many different people can be challenging. It was best to confront the differences ethically and manage them together, no matter the time it took.

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• Flexibility: Adapt quickly and thoughtfully to unexpected changes and developments and accommodate them fluidly in plans and projects. Incorporate new information to progress toward intended outcomes.

  • Volunteering at the aquarium meant working in different places each shift. These different places posed new and different projects. Being ready to promote sustainability in different ways was important.

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   Personal Learning Objective

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• Commitment: Appreciate the importance of activism and involvement, and dedicate time and energy to them.

  • I have dedicated over 500 hours of volunteering to promote sustainability and the importance of understanding cycles such as the Nitrogen Cycle to the Aquarium.

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“Grand Challenge Scholars Program.” Service Learning - Grand Challenge Scholars Program - UMBC, gcsp.umbc.edu/service-learning/.