Ask HN: Do you do volunteer work? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you do volunteer work?

10 pointsyonatanoy8 comments

Hi HN,

I'm a college student interested in spending some time doing weekly volunteer work. What's your advice on some ways I can do that? Does anyone volunteer regularly who wouldn't mind sharing their experience? Additionally, what are some ways to use a math / CS skill-set to impact my community in a positive way?

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I volunteer my time at my local FIRST high school robotics team. There are a lot of teams looking for mentors. https://chiefdelphi.com can be a good resource to find a team.

I find it extremely fulfilling teaching programming and controls to students. It's helped me grow professionally too.

I understand your volunteer work goal may be to "use a math / CS skill-set to impact my community in a positive way". There are many ways you can use your skills. For example, you could start participating in a well established and valuable open-source project or take a part in hackathons solving big problems, you could organize workshops, teach people. Anything you do, remember to balance your volunteer work with other parts of life and career.

I teach programming to kids, former Uber drivers, entrepreneurs, etc. Also training the people who teach programming.

I'm not sure if it counts as volunteering as they pay well, but it's still way below market rate and I only do it for the social impact. But it's been less impactful than expected - only one person has ever changed their life from it, which is why I stopped.

I volunteer at the humane society in my county and its a ton of fun. The staff are caring and sweet, the other volunteers are amazing, and its fun seeing all the animals getting cared for. Surprisingly, its happy and sad to see them adopted. You are glad they have found a home, but you kind of miss them.

>Additionally, what are some ways to use a math / CS skill-set to impact my community in a positive way?

You could volunteer at a code camp for underprivileged kids, or maybe tutor math for free for people who cannot afford it.

I volunteered to teach two lessons on programming to two elementary classes for coding week this year. I have never done this before.

But if you have CS skills I think you could do the same. Just visit a local school.

I volunteer on two open source not for profit projects, they're both legacy projects which would require huge amounts of work to completely modernise.

Openstreetmap has lot's of work and challenges for (also) tech types. If you like maps :-)

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