Few Georgia State students appear interested in Peace Corps opportunities
Peace Corps looking for students to join
rbarnett@gsusignal.com
September 17, 2003
Few Georgia State students appeared to be interested in the opportunities offered by the two Peace Corps representatives that occupied a remote table located in Library Plaza for three hours on Sept. 10.
By 1:00 p.m., approximately 20 students out of the 23,000 that attend GSU had stopped and inquired about the organization. According to Tom Langehaug, a Peace Corps member, and his companion, this was “quite a few.”
The Peace Corps is looking for Georgia State students who are at least 18, in good health and who are U.S. citizens with extreme dedication, compassion and “a willingness to help people.”
Volunteers spend a total of 27 months in training and service. The first three months are spent learning the language, which is usually taught by native speakers. In addition, volunteers engage in cross-cultural and technical-skills training. Also included in the training is guidance on observing locally appropriate behavior, exercising sound judgment, and abiding by Peace Corps policies and procedures for safety and security. The training takes place in the developing country that the volunteer is assigned to serve in.
The Peace Corps provides a living allowance that enables the volunteer to live similarly to the people in their local community.
Tom Langehaug, who served in Panama from January 2000 until May 2003, described his pay as that of a “first year teacher,” but said it was enough to live on because expenses were low.
Langehaug also stated that, upon returning to the United States when their time of service is over, volunteers receive a $6,000 allowance to aid in the transition to life back home.
Volunteers are granted student loan deferments while enlisted and the volunteers with Perkins loans are eligible for a 15 percent cancellation of their outstanding balance for each year of service.
The Peace Corps, started in 1961 by John F. Kennedy, is a volunteer organization that travels to developing counties in Latin America, The Caribbean, Africa, Asia, The Middle East and North Africa, Eastern Europe/Central Asia and the Pacific Islands. The goal of the Peace Corps is to provide assistance and a tremendous magnitude of education in areas such as agriculture, business development and information technology, education and youth and community development, the environment, and health and HIV/AIDS.
The Peace Corps has established partnerships with colleges and universities across the United States that offer academic credit and financial incentives to volunteers during or after Peace Corps service. Georgia State currently has a linguistics program and a public administration program.
For Langehaug the experience provided by the Peace Corps was amazing.
“I learned a lot about myself,” he said. “I liked it so much that I stayed an extra year.”
Michael Jenkins, a Peace Corps volunteer in South Africa from 1999-2001, said that his time was “one of the most amazing experiences I have ever had.”
Dawn Brooks, a current student at GSU majoring in Spanish with a minor in French, said that she once applied in 1998 but had financial issues to handle.
“But,” said Brooks, “now I am ready. I want to travel and learn a different culture.”
