Kendall J. Hampton, OERD Engagement Graduate Assistant
Kendall Hampton, OERD Graduate Assistant, shows her strong commitment to engagement at NIU.
My DeKalb High School freshman class packed into a school bus on a cold winter morning to tour the NIU campus. An excited representative told a group of eager teenagers about all the opportunities NIU offered for incoming students. Gears turned in our heads as she spoke about academics, athletics, student organizations, and campus life.
Though still four years away, we all began planning our freshman year of college – what classes we would take, what our dorm rooms would look like, and where we would spend the late nights studying. It wasn’t until many years later, as I was finishing up my undergraduate degree at NIU, that I realized how impactful that tour was. Like many students in my high school class, I saw college as an opportunity to move far away. This tour gave me insights to the opportunities in my own backyard. While, of course, I was still plotting a way to assert my independence in college, I was beginning to see the advantages of attending NIU.
Today, as a graduate research assistant, I am studying campus and community engagement in DeKalb. Growing up a Barb, I’m familiar with the area and the various events that bring NIU into the community and vice versa. However, I didn’t appreciate the importance and nuance of engagement until I started learning more about what engagement is.
The word is often used synonymously with “participated” or “involved,” but engagement is so much more profound than merely showing up. I’ve learned that a key tenet of engagement is reciprocal benefits. Engagement is not outreach. Engagement is about building lasting, meaningful partnerships where both sides benefit from the collaboration. This new perspective helped me see the campus and community engagement in a different light. I thought back to the campus tour I took so many years ago and what a shining example of engagement it was: NIU recruited future students, and I gained inspiration for my college career.
In a beautiful full-circle illustration, engagement is what initially brought me to NIU, and engagement is why I am still here, almost ten years later. I used my own experience of the lasting, meaningful, and reciprocal partnership between myself and NIU as my guide for seeking out other campus and community engagement activities to research. I studied how NIU and other universities engage on campus and in the community and found inspiration for what gets people excited about engagement.
I hope to gain even more insights to engagement at NIU. As a Master of Public Administration student with an emphasis in nonprofit management, I am excited to see the ways in which the nonprofit sector in and around DeKalb engages with the university and vice versa. Both pillars are so fundamental to DeKalb, and the intersection between the two is where collaboration thrives.
Community engagement at NIU is only continuing to grow and expand. From a nervous high school freshman to a graduate student, graduate research assistant, and engaged community member, I cannot wait to welcome the next wave of engagement at NIU.
