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Comment by saraid216 | Hacker News Reader

> I asked how she got that gig, and she told me a story about her going to Tanzania to build a school. She decided to make a real difference.

When you (or she) don't explain how she got from A to B, your epiphany has a lot less force. Most kids that come back from these trips seem to have no idea that they weren't helping. How did she realize it? How did she do something about it? How did she start actually doing something?

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Use your imagination? Someone wants to help, goes to A, someone else there will be paying attention to how that person is behaving, how effective or ineffective etc. Call it simply human behavior or scouting or what not. For most of the visitors that's it, they'll be thanked at the end and feel good, but some might get a call or an email at some point to ask of they want to be more involved with B.

So basically, you're saying that these trips are tech company interviews?

If it was a tech company interviews, they'd grill her for 8 hours about how she would implement a new branch of chlorine halocarbon organic chemistry, invent a P=NP solution to the traveling salesman problem to minimize her drive time, drill her on NMR spectrum analysis even though she'll never use a NMR on the job, sit thru an explanation of how they only want rock stars, and then, if she's a real bro and fits in with the hard partying culture and isn't too old (LOL) then she can get that entry level bench tech job, for a little while, till they run out of money.

More like a weed out class in college. It gets the volunteer some exposure to X and gets rid of the ones who aren't going to be worth more time and effort.

Yeah, I didn't explain it well. The first trip was with her church, and the job was 5 years and an engineering degree later. It was the first trip that sparked the interest and gave a comfort level with the country.

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