Civic Engagement

At GCE it is required to do a total of 200 hours of civic engagement. For my hours I decided to do them at the build out of their new school. I volunteered to work 20 hours a week with whatever they needed me to do. Having no experience in building or the machinery they were using I thought that it would be an excellent opportunity to learn.

The first job that I was tasked with was to build lighting fixtures for one of the offices and to wire it. Going about this I had to use a metal grinder and various other tools that I was unsure of how to use. I learned most of these skills through the other members of the team and completed the fixture in a couple days. Once finished I was supposed to make two more, which went much faster.

After I had finished those the flooring needed to be done and it was going to take the whole team because otherwise it would have taken forever. It took us about a week to complete the whole floor. The issues we ran into though slowed us down quite a bit. The floorboards were made of bamboo and sometimes the nail gun would not shoot the nail all the way through and it would bend, screwing up the floor board. Once we got a rhythm down it started to speed up.

Afterwards I was mainly tasked with more lighting fixtures because I already have previous knowledge in circuitry. However, the different fixtures were all unique in design and required different tools. Some needed wood to be cut and sanded, others needed pipe cutters.

From my time working at the school's build out I learned how to  use a variety of tools, styles of building, and a lot of general knowledge when it comes to building.