This weekend in Sydney, the University of New South Wales volunteer program “Yellow Shirts” celebrated its 25th anniversary. Yellow Shirts are a group of 100+ students who give up their time to help orientate new students, geographically, academically, and socially, arriving at UNSW. Orientation Week, or O-Week, is one of the largest programs of its kind, runs for a full five days from 9am til late, and is filled with activities from campus tours, to jumping castles and giant jenga to clubs and society events and live bands. Volunteers receive extensive training, and become a part of an amazing group of people once referred to as the “sunshine army”. 

Seeing the images and stories from the anniversary pop up in my facebook feed made me nostalgic and strangely homesick. Memories of my four years as a Yellow Shirt volunteer pop up in fragmented fashion. Before living in America, before cutting off all my hair, before engagement, before world travel, there was uni, and there was Yellow Shirts. 

Squads, OT, double squads, quadruple squad outings, the importance of FAFYing and CWEFLS, and never using terms and abbreviations that outsiders/newcomers wouldn’t understand. Running around late at night at training camp and accidentally bursting into a room where two Muslim volunteers were quietly praying. Rehearsing for the band in the Huts and heading up to the Rege for $5 steaks (before I was a vegetarian...) and card games. Sitting in Coffee Republic whilst the O-Week Coordinator consoled me, above and beyond her duties, because I hadn’t been selected as a squad leader - and how that year I was placed with one of the most amazing people I have ever encountered and how he changed the entire way I looked at leadership. The year it poured with rain and we moved everything inside the Roundhouse, and how one squad provided tarp-covered escorts up the Main Walkway for arriving students. The relationships that formed, the boys I fell in love with. The couples still together, the families born. One day soon there will be second-generation shirts...

Beyond the memories of those four years, reflecting this weekend has reminded me how much that time has shaped me as a person. My time at UNSW was marked by the height of my depression. One volunteer recruiting session, which lasted well into the night, saw me escaping out into the cool night air, and sitting sobbing at the top of main walkway and contemplating if I should just end everything. Despite the pain and grief I was suffering, I look back now and think of my world at UNSW as an extremely happy and productive one.

Volunteering gave me an immense number of skills, practical not only on a CV checklist but in the real world. Talking with strangers, engaging with people across cultures, and barriers of language and age, organizational skills, team work, leadership, problem solving, and event planning. These skills have allowed me to confidently venture out into the world, and directly led to paid employment in three different countries in a variety of fields, including theatre, sustainability, retail, teaching, and running my own business.

Being a Yellow Shirt led me to the Contact Coordinator role, a part-time paid position overseeing the running of an information and referral centre at the university - often referred to as the O-Week outside of O-Week. That job covered my rent and expenses whilst I finished my undergrad, and gave me the skills of managing a team of 100 student volunteers, and overseeing the success of a crucial student service at a time when student services were being reduced, or cut altogether, at universities across Australia.

Beyond the skills, the greatest part of volunteering was the people. Like-minded souls with similar interests, people who pushed my comfort zones and broadened my horizons. They opened my eyes to the world around me, taught me about leadership and teamwork, and the bounds of friendship. My fellow volunteers are among the most wonderful, creative, talented, and lovely folk I have ever encountered. They are now dotted around the globe, and have gone on to be come scientists, doctors, lawyers, analysts, economists, historians, writers, politicians, actors, musicians, journalists, mothers and fathers. I am a lucky soul indeed to be able to count them amongst my friends.

Since becoming a Yellow Shirt, I have volunteered in theaters, bookshops, and on farms. I have learnt to put my hand up for projects, and roles, where there is little or no monetary payment, that have gifted me with friendships, books, food, and impossible-to-price experiences.

I have often joked that working a day job allows me to pay for the experience of volunteering. Those countless volunteer hours, in a variety of programs, not only gave me tangible skills, and a degree, they undeniably shaped who I am. And for that, I am eternally grateful.