welcome to the secrets of college planning i'm your host anthony uva and today we're going to get some insight in community service my guest today is eric seckel and he's the associate director for st peters university for community service  university loved up in boston actually kind of reminds me a little bit of jersey city which is where i'm from i love the accent so yes i went to boss university graduated study classical history which often i'm not sure for many students i'm sure they're always like well what do i do with my major i picked a major that you don't really do much latin is not exactly spoken anymore so well so usually let's go back in time how did you pick boston university this is going to sound terrible but you know it was i put my parents wanted me to apply to a lot of different schools  my uncle actually had gone to boston university and so when we were who my parents they were very instrumental in my selection when we were kind of sitting down to go over everything that seemed to also be kind of like a little  draw because my uncle had been there and he joined his time so that really kind of ended up being the place and you know it's funny i didn't even visit it until i got to these are things not to do and not to do you know i lucked out but for the most part you want to visit of my number one choice i've been waitlisted at holy cross who i wasn't a huge fan of i visited that school and so it really kind of came down to both university and george  washington and you know i think again i think it was just kind of that connection with my uncle that kind of said ok and and i loved it i had a great time with boston great so now you're at you're at campus there when you start thinking about community service and getting to where you are today at st peter's university while i don't think i ever know i i've gone to like i said a jesuit high school st peter's prep and community service christian service was very important very important to the mission so i had kind of always i just seem drawn to it i believe in it obviously and so when i was up in boston i got involved i used to the piano and then i start i play i dabble a little bit and so i started playing and went for for clean up so that was something that i really enjoyed and kind of it always kind of stuck with me but my focus when i got out of college was obviously it was like oh it's what i do you know i love history and i recommend you have to you have to major in what you love even if in theory your career the same yourself i don't know what i don't know what job i'm going to get because you don't want to be in a major that where you're miserable you know you really want to be passionate about your studies here so you other things before you before you became yes so i i graduated and i was to my parents disappointment i was kind of like a painter handyman for a little bit i didn't you know i really didn't know what i wanted to do and so kind of just to make ends meet and get some money  yeah so why be a money so i was able to i started you know like i was just doing these kind of odd jobs but my mother was working in a school in jersey city a catholic grammar school  and so i decided to she said well we always kind of need to subzero i started subbing there and there was a seventh grade position open teaching history social studies and so when that and so when the school year ended  and got the job and i taught there for four years loved it fell in love with teaching loved the it was an inner city school actually it's the last inner city school catholic school in jersey city a city but i so i loved it and i during that time i got my masters at seton hall in education and then planned on maybe go planned on going to public school teaching in public schools  now i love the catholic schools but money was not the was out there so so how did you get the st peters university so i started applying to all public schools for teaching positions and had a few interviews and then i got a call from some kind of my mentor from st peter's prep father told me as our go and he had mentioned a few times he's like oh there are some positions at st peter's prep you should apply and then this time was you know i was a little nervous and i i you know and i think you have to talk thing like decisions like this out with family friends so i said you know what i said i remember my mother said well you were always very involved in community service christian service she said this is seems like the ideal position for you and at that moment it wasn't the track that i had been planning but you know i thought a lot about and i said i'll take a shot at it so i started there and i was there for two years and then a parent of a student who was working who was at st peter's prep mentioned she was the director of campus ministry it right up the block at st peter's college at the time now university and she said oh you should apply for this associate director position and i did that was a tough that was a tough decision though to leave prep because that had been even in my yearbook my senior year year book like my dream job was to work at prep so i've had it and it's like why am i leaving  but i no way do i regret it st peter's prep but just fell in love with st peter's university and working in the campus ministry specifically obviously the community service so no what do you do as the associate director  main my main responsibilities are the i support the domestic service program but basically community service is so important to the mission of jesuit universities and high schools and colleges that  you know they put an emphasis on it and so what i did my responsibility is to you know it's the greatest job in the world i offer students opportunities to help people and hopefully they begin to really buy into and believe in this idea of being a man or woman for others serving others and so basically you know and in my mind i'm a very simple person i said i will one of the needs in the community and will come up with programs for each one yeah it's great so now as a student of the university what do they expect when they go into community service well the the cool thing about st peter's and this is always kind of a debate that a lot of people have should you require community service or should you you know should it be just completely voluntary for the most part it's voluntary at st peter's although i know student organizations have to do a service project an athletic the do service projects but basically they come to me they come to me and you know i try to work with them and try to say are what are you interested in basically i'll set up a lot of different service projects in different programs and then it's up to them if they want to get involved and but i mean this is why i think it is amazing because we get almost little more than half of our students who do some sort of community service  so we have a tutoring program it's actually through the federal work study program it's called america reed so it's mentoring program in the afterschool programs in jersey city we have a program called from when i was in college my roommate was like oh you're from jer's cities like dirty city and like that ok ok i was very happy with that so later on i was like let's make a difference let's go out and actually show that we care about a community  students love that it's i mean it's the most basic of things but it's really it's really an example i mean you're out there yes you clean up it's really it's kind of show the community that we love jersey city and then i guess actually i'll say my favorite pro i came with the my teacher not my favorite i should say that we have we started a campus kitchen at st peters two years ago and it was we were the thirty ninth campus kitchen in the country and the second in new jersey there was only the other one is in atlantic city so a lot a lot of space in between and what we do is we cover i say reclaim but we recover food that would be wasted you'd be surprised how often when you pitch this idea people think that i'm going over to their to their plates and be like are you going to finish that it's some sort of a bin that i give people who are hungry is basically taking the unused trays of food from restaurants not so much restaurants but dining halls cafeterias so if you think about it you know cafeterias dining halls caterers they think coke for the number of people but if people don't show up people decide not to eat in the dining hall or at the cafeteria they have tons of food trays of food in the back so we take that and then we get it to people who need it we make sure that we repackage it so that it's a full healthy meal and twenty five months we've done twenty three thousand meals and really the only again the only cost school but like basal from about two thirty or three to five we go in we see what food we have we always we also get food from an organization called table to table they're kind of like the intermediary between grocery stores and then soup kitchens and cetera so they give us produce can nonperishable food meat cheese whatever so we get that plus now we're also connected with blue apron food the hudson county health and human services so on a normal cooking shift will walk in and say art we were preparing meals for these people for this group how many are what do we do do we have cooked food already do we have do we need to coke we need to add to it all meant that whatever and it's a great i mean it's just an amazing program because you're saving so much the that is forty percent of all food the united states is thrown out which is insane given the fact that like sixty million americans are food insecure so students love this because they get to see you know a real you know they see the trays of food that we saved and we see in their lives to see go to the people who need it now are you helping just the community of jersey city new jersey you are you helping new york city  individual families or shelters or soup kitchens hey we'll give you food on tuesday every tuesday is daunting if what if you don't have the food what if the dining hall and our pop warner in the dining hall seduction they've been an amazing partner who what if everybody ate all the food that day so what you know so when we started out i was very nervous and want to limit it originally i was like i will do fifty meals a week and that quickly changed to two hundred meals a week to where we're at now it's about five hundred but the focus is the individual we do individual homes individual families that's the toughest because if you're not  time and you know how do you get things there you know again we've been very lucky that some donors have given us we have too many vans that we used to deliver but you know you still limited you know i  gentleman called my office because he was looking for some meals he was in elizabeth and took me a total of two hours just to go there and back to the river three meals so we would love to expand and deliver to more places it's just always be limited so you know with the three with the first so the second campus kitchen in new jersey but i would hope that other universities kind of buy into this and maybe open i know that have been in contact with and they see they establish or help you with stablish a campus kitchen whether it's high school or university so you go through that that's who you would basically work with and they set you up and get everything you know go through all the pro go through his act it's actually quite extensive could you're running a commercial kitchen so are you you go through all the you understand the paperwork all the documentation you know where  you going to be working we're lucky that we have our own kitchen but many universities work in their dining providers kitchen so so yes so contacting them would be the first step i believe that we're up to about fifty five camps kitchens in the country now so even within two years that sixteen that that now is their donors that come in and doni different things to do the campus kitchen and the ministry and so ye food so we received from those two places and then table to table like i mentioned groceries but you know the community has been st peter's community has been behind it completely and so we're constantly getting nonperishable food  to as like kind of pantry staples that we can use and and actually in connection to the campus kitchen we also have a food pantry and clothes closet and st peters so we are able to provide other you know we're providing cook meals on one end but now if people want to cook for themselves who can provide you know nonperishable food clothes toiletries it's out of so so tell us a little bit about st peter's university as well  undergrad maybe twenty one hundred undergrad and one of the things that i love about st peters is i absolutely love the we are very ethnically diverse so that that me is and it reflects jersey city you know kind of this melting pot this you know the golden door the greatest city in the world and some people would say me it's it's you know the i'll give you an example the present obama had a presidential committee service interface challenge and he's and it's been done a couple times each year and i realized that so the idea was to do some sort of community service  with people of other ethnic backgrounds religious backgrounds and i remember i remember speaking to our director i said you know this is we do this every day the beauty of our universities that we're so diverse that are oh this is a really difficult for us you know we don't have to plan anything and that's a means the is the best part of st peter's and it's a it's a really we cater to we serve a lot of first generation college students which is very cool  yeah it's just it's a great place what what came kids expect when they come to st peter's versus everyone i can say that it is a true community because it's a small school but you know i'm trying to think of how to put this without making it sound strange the you know a lot of our faculty they are there because they they're there because they care nobody's there really for the paycheck but because they care about the students they're very good teachers very involved you know i find that at least from my experience at boston university which is i think thirty thousand students  and i really enjoyed my time there i found my kind of kind of found my nature whatever but here it's very it's not people get to know almost everyone you know you can know you can know everyone in the community and we support each other in that way where we have i think we're about sixty forty resident two commuter so we have a lot of commuters as well actually i think it's reversed that i think it's sixty sixty commuter forty residents but yeah i mean coming in you know you people will know who you wore people will be reaching out to you i think st peters provides excellent services to the students especially incoming students i'm just thinking to myself they started something new this year success coaches so you know so i had about twenty students that are that i am their success coach  and this freshman and you know obviously you can dechen that can look very different depending on the the success coach if you can be like ok you know let me know if you need anything and then you never hear from the success coach but we certainly you know i can just speak for myself and my colleagues you know we have we hosted a pizza party for any of our students you know come in meet you know keep a check in with your success coach how with things go and things like  the staff faculty administrators live that out because they are very invested in the student success and that they in that they are you know it's not just oh you're a student here and we want you to succeed academically we want you to be we want you to get involved in whatever you're being drawn in whatever your you know whatever you're interested in we want you to succeed in all facets of life now you see a lot of kids once they come to school and they do a lot of community service at the university t service while it is to meets obviously essential as to be human is to serve others and to care for others but it looks very good on your resume and quite often places that you volunteer at  sometimes will hire you i can think of a few students who volunteered at a site and then they were hired on to work full time when they graduated and certainly i mean when when you i mean that's our goal as teachers or administrators staff whatever we want to instill these values of care and concern and for others and service to others and fighting for justice and ideally you have all these experiences of community service you learn about different issues but then you go off into your career and live these values out in your career so it doesn't necessarily mean that you you know they just gave you a couple examples of students working in nonprofits afterwards but no matter what your job position is whatever your job or career you can certainly serve others in that way do you see you see a lot of schools at the high school level when you go to the high school level they talk about college and things do you see a lot of that community service in the high school as well when they go into college yeah i mean i think you know what is it a community service is like the popular thing now but it kind of thankfully we even in high schools they require students to do some sort of community service so lawson show up at least at st peter show up and they've they have multiple you know experiences of serving in the community that they can you know some bad some good but then so you know it's not something brand new to them i've never met a student was like what do you mean like so we're going to help people really so with the ever see the embassy a lot of students use it on their application and apply and they should they should i'm sure that i'm sure some do that when i started there are really want to track all hours so that if a student came to me and said for the last four years how many hours of i don't i can give i can provide that to really but yeah but i absolutely i mean you know students should use it it doesn't mean that it cheapens what you've done  it just but you know i was just speaking to a student who is going into physical therapy and you know some of the some of the school she was applying to require that they expected you to have done a certain number of hours of service so  so certainly certainly it's essential just to get involved in anything but particularly with service when we come to the end of our show so usually i ask my guests with what advice do you want to give to the parents out there that their sons or daughters are thinking about going to college and thinking of community service what advice would you like to give them no matter where the their child goes you want i would stress that the students get involved that your children get involved in community service particularly because studies show that when suit when you're more involved whether it's in the student activities or in community service you do better in school academically you know i think it's also a great opportunity to meet people to interact with your classmates so you know i a few students have met their significant other on service projects and that doesn't mean that you know you show up you're like there's my wife and i was ready to meet her but but the more you get involved whether whether in student organizations or community service i really do believe that it is it helps the body mind and soul and certainly gives them an opportunity key thing is they get to they get to experience some things that maybe take them out of their comfort