This misconception is why so many seniors desperately roamed the aisles of the Career Forum last week.

Community service is the ideal means of finding one's place in society. It provides direct experience with the real world, while still allowing students to have some fun in college. If you want to be a doctor, rather than working in a lab, work for a children's outdoor program and get first-hand contact with the people to whom you will eventually be administering. If your interests lie in public policy, business or publishing, your interests are better served by knowing the people you intend to serve.

But in order for community service to be most useful, it needs to be performed conscientiously. Of the 1,000 undergraduates who perform some kind of community service, few consider the social implications of their actions. Many who participate in service programs merely go through the motions. And while Phillips Brooks House points proudly to the fact that over 1,000 Harvard students participate in the program yearly, the reason this number is so high is that the individual level of commitment is very low. Students consider PBHA programs something nice to do--the frosting on their activities rather than the substance.

Yes, sad but true. Community service is rarely a student's primary extra-curricular. Editors and writers for publications sometimes spend twelve hours a day working for their papers. The Institute of Politics and Harvard Student Agencies demand a fair number of weekly hours as well. And the average dramaturg devotes two hours daily to a theatrical production. The typical Harvard do-gooder however, rarely devotes more than one afternoon a week to social service.

It is this idea that community service is the exclusive realm of the 'do-gooder' that diminishes its prestige in student's minds. While few undergraduates intend to totally dedicate themselves to social service, almost all of students want to contribute the world in a positive way. Whether by reforming campaign finance or providing more efficient financial service than J.P Morgan, everyone hopes to find a place in the real world where their talents are useful to society. We are all 'do-gooders' in the end. The bustle of the Career Forum just makes us forget that.

Christina S. Lewis '02 is a History and Literature concentrator in Leverett House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.