By Rick Vacek | May 9, 2024
Community service is a key component of several Hobson Wildenthal Honors College programs. But to be effective, that commitment requires another component – students who are eager to serve.
For example, there’s the Comets Hospital Elder Life Program, more commonly known as Comets HELP. It enables students to volunteer in the elderly inpatient unit of UT Southwestern’s Clements Hospital.
Also available is the Victor L. Worsfold Grant Program Fund, which provides up to $1,000 for student-led service activities.
New on the service radar during the 2023-24 academic year is Comets Refugee Education and Development (aka Comets READ), a liaison with Lee A. McShan Jr. Elementary School in Dallas. Students use their free time to help 185 McShan students, most of them foreign born, learn English and get acclimated to America.
Dr. Donal Skinner, dean of the Honors College, is happy to help students access programs of this nature because he loves the way the work puts their agile minds to good use. It is one of the many joys he has found in his UT Dallas role since arriving in early 2023.
“The student quality here is phenomenal,” he said. “I think if you’ve only ever been at UT Dallas, you just think that’s how all students are. It’s not true. I love the commitment, the passion, the can-do – they come to you with ideas.”
Here are two students who demonstrate that can-do attitude.
Like a good tailor, Sneha Sharma sensed that Comets READ would be a perfect fit for her peers. If she could just convince them to try it on, surely they would see how good it made them feel.
The University of Texas at Dallas sophomore had just completed her Summer of Service, a McDermott Scholars Program requirement after a student’s first year, in the Vickery Meadow Summer Reading Academy.
The task was simple: Read to the children. Pour into them. Help them feel more comfortable in their new home.
But after she completed the program’s 12 days of five-hour shifts and looked forward to the academy’s school year program in the McShan Reading Homeroom, she realized that something was missing: more relatable voices like hers.
“I thought we needed to bring more youth into this,” she said. “We need these elementary students to feel as if they have a friend, someone who can connect on a deeper level. I thought pairing college students with them would be great.”
She found an eager accomplice in Skinner, who solicited volunteers in his weekly newsletter and by word of mouth, offered to subsidize and provide space for meetings, and introduced Sharma to another Honors College student, Samar Ahmed, who used her graphic arts talents to create a logo for the program.
As of early March, 19 UT Dallas students were visiting McShan at least once a week. The 185 young participants weren’t the only ones delighted with the new volunteers. So, too, was Dalene Buhl, the McShan program’s founder and chief operating officer.
“The joy that they bring, the mentorship, the modeling, is over-the-top perfect for our kids,” she said. “They are perfect English speakers for our students who don’t have mentors who speak English other than their teachers. I can’t ask for better tutors than those who come from UTD.”
Sharma and the other Honors College students are a perfect fit for another reason. Many of them come from families no more than a generation removed from first entering the United States. They can relate.
Buhl told of how many of the UT Dallas students come to her and say things like, “I want to give back because my parents were immigrants. English was not my first language. I love working with kids.”
Sharma, whose parents emigrated from India to Idaho in 1999, loves working with kids so much, she was a licensed child care provider for her school district while still in high school. “I got to be a kid again with them,” she said. “That was really fun – I never saw it as a job.”
Her McShan role isn’t always as lighthearted. Some of the children have told her shocking stories about horrors that were afflicted on family and friends in their homelands.
“It is just so heartbreaking,” said Sharma, who also volunteers with Comets HELP. “It means a lot to be able to help them read and help them feel safer and a little bit more connected to this new community that they’re hopefully going to call home.”
Sharma said she applied to 24 colleges but always knew in her heart that UT Dallas would be her new home. “It was just so beautiful,” she said.
Becoming a McDermott Scholar made it even more of a no-brainer, but the program’s financial package (a $291,000 value for out-of-state students) wasn’t the only reason to come to Texas.
“I love being part of the program,” she said. “Some of my closest friends are McDermotts, and every single day I am so insanely grateful. I couldn’t have made a better choice.”
Senior Aryan Verma wants to be a doctor. His passion is geriatrics, and the neuroscience major is getting a head start with his involvement in Comets HELP, a joint initiative between the Honors College and the UT Southwestern Geriatric Medicine Division.
The goal is to prevent delirium and functional decline in older adults while teaching students about geriatric medicine. Verma’s interest in the field was inspired during the pandemic by his weekly Zoom calls with a 79-year-old gentleman who also loved to talk football and still played the drums despite the onset of dementia.
“Although he had cognitive decline, I realized that his persona and his huge, larger-than-life demeanor was still with him,” Verma said. “I was just grateful to be a part of his journey through such a difficult time, in which older adults were isolated and distanced from loved ones, to help him as much as I could and get him through those challenges.
“That journey also showed me greater challenges that older adults face in the North Texas community, such as caregiver burnout, high prescription drug costs and social isolation.”
Comets HELP was started in 2018 when Dr. Jessica Voit, daughter of retired Honors College dean Dr. Edward “Ted” Harpham, joined the UT Southwestern faculty and saw the need to implement the American Geriatric Society’s HELP program.
While visiting for two to three hours a week, about 60 UT Dallas students benefit from lectures and workshops at the hospital as well as talking with older patients, their families, nurses and physical therapists.
“We’re looking for students who are bright, who are passionate, who are invested in this,” Voit said. “This is not meant to be just a checked box. It’s a commitment.
“I see this as mutually beneficial. The students are hungry for opportunities to be at Southwestern and be exposed to health care and medicine, and it’s a great opportunity to use them to make a difference.”
The program inspired Verma to start a campus group, Memories Matter, designed to unite students in the fight against Alzheimer’s and create a partnership with the Alzheimer’s Association.
He even took a group of students to the state capital to speak with legislators about dementia policies and was thrilled to watch as the three bills they backed were passed by the legislature and signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott.
Verma benefited from another taste of politics when he spent the fall 2023 semester in Washington, D.C., thanks to an Archer Fellowship. The program provides qualified UT System undergraduate and graduate students with tuition and funding for the trip to the nation’s capital.
“I met amazing students from universities across Texas,” he said.
Now, as he revs up for a career in geriatrics, he displays the can-do attitude Skinner finds so fervent among Honors College students at UT Dallas.
“Age is just a number,” Verma said. “It doesn’t mean that you are limited from whatever goal you want to achieve. And the beauty about it is that, for each person, aging looks a little bit different.
“The goal is to understand where that person is and meet them where they are to help them find what gives them purpose, what drives them, and then give them opportunities and advancements to be where they want to be.”
That mentality in the Honors College goes both ways – students often are recruited with that in mind, and many of them are looking for a university where they can put that passion to work.
It serves everyone well.
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