Volunteering: Unpaid experience for charitable organisations
Volunteering experience can build skills alongside helping others within your community. Depending on where you volunteer, you could also meet like-minded people and build your networks which may help you in your future career. Volunteering can consist of short-term projects, in the UK or abroad, during vacation time or a part-time during term. For example, you might do some voluntary tutoring at a local school, via Imperial’s Pimlico Connection programme. Visit our Volunteering webpage for more information and lots of interesting charities you can volunteer for.
Darren: Nursing home volunteer
Darren is a volunteer at a nursing home when he is at home. He started this while doing his Duke of Edinburgh Award in his final year of school. This is what Darren has to say about the experience.
“One of my patients mentioned that their daughter was some sort of manager at my local hospital and after chatting to them a bit more, they offered to mention me to them. Mary (the daughter) rang me and invited me into an interview for the part time porter job which I now do. I wasn’t looking to leverage a connection with a patient, I was simply talking to June to make her feel more comfortable. What this taught me was how important human connections are and how opportunities can arise from these.”
Darren is now training to be a doctor, he struggles a bit with the clinical placements, but he remembers the connection he has with the residents of the nursing home which helps him remember why he is doing this.
Aisha: Soup Run
Charity is one of the five pillars of Islam and something which Aisha feels is important and enjoys doing. As an international student she feels it is important that she can give something back to her new community that is supporting her while she is here in the UK and decided she wanted to volunteer. She is a very determined, high achieving student so doesn’t have much time but would still like to do something. She looks on the Union clubs and societies page and finds Soup Run.
It is a very relaxed society that always has space for her to help out when she has time which works well with her timetable. She enjoys working with the other volunteers when she is able to and chatting to their different clients who come from all sorts of interesting backgrounds. Aisha finds volunteering a nice way to relax and do something completely different from her studies while she gives back to her community.