Like Hahn, most graduates who opt for service after college already have the community service habit. While at Pomona, DeRoche, who majored in English and minored in politics, taught a couple of high school English classes in a program called College Bound, which prepares minority students for college. DeRoche, like many young people in TFA or the Peace Corps, started off thinking about the impact she could have on the world and was surprised by the impact the experience had on her own life. Teach for America frequently lures people into long-term teaching careers. The Peace Corps impact is more complicated.
Many volunteers become fluent in a second language.
Many suffer culture shock when they leave, and then reverse culture shock when they return. Some find their sense of themselves as Americans is never quite the same. She spent two years teaching English in Cameroon, and then another year and a half supervising a program in Cote d'Ivoire. Now she is teaching reading to seventh graders in New Hampshire and plotting her return to living abroad. Esther Limb '97 recently returned from a Peace Corps posting in Ukraine, teaching high school English.