To me, a community is a group of people who share like hobbies or concerns with me, and I always know they listen and value my contributions. One method in which I contribute to my community is by being a mentor in a local nonfiction book club based in Lexington.

Before I was invited to become a mentor, I was just another regular student in this book club. Although I enjoyed studying the world around me, I still often found conventional textbooks bland and too wordy. So, I gladly signed up for this book club, hoping that I could gain more knowledge while getting to know new people.

Students in the book club were each assigned to read a specific chapter of the book with a randomly chosen student. Then, each pair had to design a slideshow about the chapter.

When I first joined, there were no available mentors for the book club because it had just been newly formed. So, when my group was working on our first slideshow, we sometimes felt lost and needed help. But, with the absence of a mentor, and the director of the book club always being very busy, nobody could help us. In the end, we still pulled through, but I felt that our slideshow was rushed, and could’ve been better if we had a mentor helping us.

So, after my third year in the book club, the director invited me to become a mentor for new students, along with a few of my friends whom I’ve gotten to know very well from our years in the book club.

While working with these new students and answering their questions, I noticed that each person had something to contribute to their project, and every group had a stunning project by the time they were done.

All of the groups that I have worked with also acknowledged and cherished my help a lot, and I felt great, because I had become the person for other people that I had once needed.

I plan to build community in the future by also helping people who need it, and by allowing everyone’s unique ideas to be heard. I am also planning to begin a class on Science Bowl, which is something that I really enjoy and have gotten quite good at, this summer with some friends in school, so that all people may experience the joy that I did.