Eyes Wide Open Week of Awareness

MSC FISH hosted its annual Eyes Wide Open Week of Awareness on October 13-17 to educate Texas A&M students on important topics that many students are unfamiliar with. This service project provides support to non-profit organizations while opening Aggies’ eyes to substantial issues and causes in the local community and around the world. Each FISH committee hosted a day during this week-long event and around 200 Texas A&M students participated each day.

Whoop! for Troops Returns for its 14th Year!

Executive Director of Community Service, Jessica Lochte ’15 from Fredericksburg, Texas, is heading up MSC LEAD’s Whoop! For Troops this year. This community service project is special to her because “it gives [her] the opportunity to do something great for troops during the holidays when they are away from their families.” Started in 2003, Whoop! For Troops sent 4,000 cards and 120 care packages overseas last year. Lochte hopes Aggie will help MSC LEAD send even more cards and care packages to troops this year!

MSC Sending Students South for Spring Break Service

Instinct and tradition lead students south during spring break, especially when weather patterns make College Station feel like the icy Upper Midwest. While students across Texas will be hoping for beach weather temperatures on South Padre Island, Will Hughes '16, the Travel Coordinator for MSC Freshmen Leadership International (FLI), has his sights set lower--on the map, that is. The sophomore Geology major from The Woodlands is coordinating MSC FLI's annual spring break service trip to Costa Rica, where the weather will certainly be warmer than it is here.

Trip Planning Since School Started
Hughes and his team have been working on trip logistics and making travel arrangements since mid-September. "Most of my fall has been involved in sitting down and working out the budget, flights, hotel rooms, and getting pricing figured out,"  Hughes says, but he and his team also conducted an applicant review and selection process, began fundraising for the trip, and strove to communicate as much information about the trip as early as possible to the twenty-two freshmen selected to participate .

"That was a big thing I focused on. Last year, when I went home for Christmas break I told my family that I was going on this trip but I wasn't able to give them many concrete details because I didn't really know any," Hughes says. He wanted students to be armed with more details about the trip, so at pre-departure meetings this fall Hughes says "we were able to give a couple of presentations and we had a really good handout, a rough itinerary and a general overview of the trip--where we’re staying, what we’re doing, where we’re going."