A year and a half after Hurricane Katrina dashed Jenna Klebanoff's hopes of enrolling at Tulane University in New Orleans, La., she will finally make it to the Gulf Coast. Klebanoff, a sophomore at Boston University, camped out for 24 hours to secure a slot on one of BU's coveted alternative spring break trips to New Orleans.
Unlike Dartmouth's more rigorous system of choosing service trip participants, BU selects students on a first-come first-serve basis, though Klebanoff did say she completed a small application prior to waiting in line.
"You hand in a little, silly application with questions like, 'If you were a kitchen utensil, what would you be?'" she said.
By contrast, the system of determining who will be accepted for service trips at Dartmouth puts more stock in applications and interviews. The three-page application for March's Katrina Education and Service Trips asked students to write about topics including their reasons for applying and what challenges they expected to face on the trip, as well as to describe their prior experiences with fundraising (each participant had to raise $1,000 before the trip).
After completing the written applications, potential travelers interviewed with the leaders of the two service trips heading to the Gulf Coast this spring, explained one trip's co-leader, Brian DeGrazia '08. DeGrazia estimated that 50 students applied to fill the 26 slots for the trips this year. Though these applicants applied through the Tucker Foundation, the trip leaders are ultimately in charge of selecting the roster of students for their trips.
Even as Hurricane Katrina moves further into the past, students continue to volunteer in droves for service trips to the Gulf Coast, according to Will Canestaro '06, a post-graduate fellow at Tucker.
"The trips are as relevant now as they were a year earlier," he said.
Though some trips to Katrina will be comprised of participants selected from the entire student body, other trips are sponsored by various campus organizations. Some of these groups are recruited but others approach the Tucker foundation about sending members on service trips, Canestaro said.
For last year, Canestaro pegged the ratio of potential applicants to accepted participants for the trips at about three to one.
"I think the number of applicants has stayed about the same but our resources in the number of trips we can take has increased," he said. "Last year, the minority [of applicants] got accepted and the majority got turned away. This year it's the opposite."
Over the last year, College President James Wright allocated more money to Hurricane Katrina Relief, providing more students the ability to participate in service trips this year. To that end, more service trips to the Gulf Coast may be scheduled throughout the course of the year -- such as during the break between the Spring and Summer terms -- said Kimberly Jeffers '06, the projects coordinator for Gulf Coast.
Trips to the Gulf Coast will continue for at least another year, Canestaro said, since Tucker made a three-year commitment to sending students to help the region in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. After three years, the organization will evaluate its decision to continue to send trips there based on whether or not the trips will still be effective.
In general, Canestaro sees service trips as rising in popularity to a point where they may become, in the minds of students, just as popular as foreign study programs.
"We're moving into an era where the next big thing will be service trips," he said. "There's a huge student demand out there and the resources need to meet the demand."
