Hoya Staff Writer Friday, May 19, 2006 Lindsay Anderson/The Hoya Rashad Jones

Oftentimes, for Rashad Jones (SFS ’06), the days just aren’t long enough. On a typical afternoon, he’ll try to fit classes and assignments into a schedule already packed with numerous meetings, social functions and other commitments, usually including trips across town to tutor children in southeast D.C. The meetings often overlap, forcing him to scramble to attend them, at least in part, before heading home to finish the day’s homework and grab about four hours of sleep. And that’s on a good day. “I’ll go to one meeting for an hour . then leave early, go to another meeting,” Jones says. “Even when meetings are cancelled . that just means I can spend more time at another meeting.” The hectic lifestyle is understandable considering his resume. As a member, leader and founder of dozens of political, artistic, cultural and social advocacy groups on campus and across the District, Jones has acquired a reputation as one of Georgetown’s most involved students. He is a resident of Georgetown’s Black House, vice president of GU Men Advocating Relationship Responsibility, vice president of the NAACP’s Georgetown chapter, co-founder of a tutoring program at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, co-chair of the Students of Color Alliance and a member of the Student Safety Advisory Board, the Alpha Phi Omega community service fraternity and the Senior Class Committee. And that’s just for starters. But for Jones, the Georgetown experience can’t be summed up in a single defining event or organization. For him, Georgetown was all about a journey, in which a young freshman with aspirations to join the U.S. Foreign Service learned about the virtues of social justice and community advocacy. “I think when I first got here I just wanted to try everything,” Jones says. “I think what motivated me, I think, was I started to recognize the privilege I had of being at Georgetown. . Students of color, their issues are ignored a lot of the time.” It was Jones’ desire to sample a bit of everything the Hilltop had to offer that prompted him to join such a broad array of campus groups, such as the South Asian Society’s Rangila dance performance, that he didn’t know if he would enjoy at first. He says he found that many of the groups he sampled appealed to him, leading him to join and often assume leadership positions. To Jones, coming from a mostly black high school in Atlanta, the potential to reach out to groups, people and ideas he was unfamiliar with was one of the defining characteristics of the Georgetown experience. Jones’ high school debate team experience, in particular, had taken him to tournaments across the country and inspired him to pursue a career in diplomacy. But it was only after he arrived in D.C. as a freshman at Georgetown, he says, that he discovered his interest in social advocacy. “One of the things I really enjoyed at Georgetown is cultivating relationships with people I would have never met had I not come to Georgetown. People with different backgrounds, interests, different perspectives,” he says. “It’s up to us to . learn about each other. . You might even find out more about your own self.” For Jones, though, the turning point in his college experience came in the fall of his junior year, when he studied abroad in Morocco. He says his exposure to new classmates, places and ideas there made him decide to combine his love of foreign service with a desire to help the underprivileged and to pursue social justice activities. “I learned more about Georgetown being abroad than I did being at Georgetown,” he says. “It made me realize there is life outside Healy gates, and there are people who can benefit from our help.” After he returned to Georgetown, Jones threw himself into social advocacy causes in the D.C. area with even more vigor. He currently organizes and participates in activities sponsored by several groups, such as the Black Student Alliance, promoting campus diversity. Despite the new, and even busier, schedule, Jones still had time to serve as a tutor for middle-schoolers and high-schoolers at Duke Ellington and the Washington Middle School for Girls in Anacostia, as well as become a student liaison for the Kids2College program in southeast D.C., which encourages sixth-graders to learn more about opportunities in higher education. But Jones says that Georgetown still has a long way to go in its efforts to reach out to the local community and to promote diversity on its own campus. “I applaud their efforts but I think there’s a lot more they can do,” he says of the university’s social advocacy groups. “I just found it really strange that students in the area who go to high school here think that Georgetown is unattainable and they haven’t had any contact with Georgetown whatsoever.” Jones also emphasizes that administrators need to take steps to develop a “support network” for campus minorities, who he says often feel isolated and insecure after they arrive on campus for the first time. “I think that Georgetown assumes that because they bring in a diverse group of people . it’s going to be like a melting pot. You need to do a little stirring,” he says. “If everyone’s in their own little clique it’s not really diverse.” In the meantime, Jones hopes he can pursue his dual goals of social advocacy and diplomatic work over the next few years with his Pickering Fellowship from the State Department, which pays for his graduate education and requires him to spend four and a half years afterward as a Foreign Service officer. He plans to work for the State Department this summer, in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research’s Office of African Affairs, before heading to the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where he will pursue a master’s degree with a concentration in conflict transformation and security. But as he prepares to depart the Hilltop, Jones has a clear message he hopes future Hoyas will keep in mind as they pursue their own Georgetown experience. “Do one thing out of your comfort zone every week,” he says. “Go to a meeting you’ve never heard of before. Go to a restaurant you’ve never gone to before. Talk to a random person . and learn about them.”