At around 11 p.m. last Friday night, I clocked out of my closing shift at The Midnight MUG for the final time. It’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that in the fall I won’t be trudging across campus to my house at 3 a.m. covered in syrup and coffee grounds. It didn’t become real to me until I took down my nameplate from The Corp’s Chief Operating Officer desk and turned my 30-something keys and COO Blackberry over to the next bright-eyed Corpie officers for their turn to run this company.
My parents joke that I majored in Corp. Their jokes are much more accurate than they realize, considering that I’ve spent far more time at a storefront or at my Corp desk than I ever did on schoolwork. However, this did not stop me from getting an education. I’ve never been to a school like Georgetown — a school where the campus life and community are driven, lead and inspired by the students far more than by a top-down administration. We run our coffee shops, grocery stores, banks, newspapers and student government almost exclusively on our own. As we say in The Corp, there are no grown-ups allowed. And as much as I have learned in Georgetown’s classrooms, the unique leadership and entrepreneurial opportunity The Corp has provided me has expanded my Georgetown education even more. Georgetown students can hardly appreciate the freedom we have at this school to captain our own education and direct our community.
In exchange, we each have an obligation to enrich the community around us and to earn our place at this school by contributing whatever we can, however we can, to sustain this vibrant community.
For my part, I contribute a cup of coffee. Standing tall at six inches, this 12-ounce, $1.50 cup of socially responsible caffeine might be the first of four for one student, the midday pick-me-up for an administrator or a desperate inspirational beverage for someone at 1:59 a.m. when he has 10 pages to go. But does this cup of coffee earn what Georgetown has given me? Could it ever? Georgetown gave me some of the best friends I’ll ever have, engaging in late-night chats in our Leavey office or on the couches after The Midnight MUG has closed, and in return I’ll ring up your Bagel Bites. “Here,” said Georgetown, “enjoy having a seat in front of professors Madeleine Albright and Marc Busch.” “And here!” I cried in return. “Please let me lift your storage boxes.”
Georgetown let me be on the board of directors of a multi-million dollar, student-run company, and I pay it back by negotiating with a vendor to get pre-packaged chocolate-covered espresso beans. Georgetown gave me license to pursue happiness in clubs, office hours and genuine conversations on graduation, life and relationships in senior capstone. In return I got licensed to be a D.C. food handler, so for four years I could keep our stores open and operational.
If you measure a year in the time it takes to serve a cup of coffee, my service to the community is probably no more than three minutes of someone’s day, and my meager contribution has hardly compensated for what Georgetown has given to me: the community, education, friends and experience. But it’s something. The scale or visibility of the impact may vary, but each student has an obligation to give back to the community from which we enrich our own lives, an obligation that extends beyond the gates and after graduation.
This is more than just a call for extracurricular involvement, although I maintain that no Georgetown experience is complete if you never leave a classroom or the library, no matter what your transcript says. Rather, it is a call to serve one another and lend our time and talents to this community, even if it’s only through the art of beverage preparation and latte foam.
On Saturday, I will graduate. Someone will hand me a diploma in exchange for all of the sweat, coffee and tears that I’ve put in over the last four years. It’s taken me that long to understand all that Georgetown has given me, and it would take many more years and lattes to repay that, but that’s no excuse not to try. I can’t offer a lot, but it’s all I’ve got.
Would you like room for milk with that?
Brooke Heinichen is a senior in the School of Foreign Service and the former chief operating officer of The Corp.
