Hi! I’m Emily Larson. I’m the Service Learning Ambassador for IRIS, the Iowa Radio Reading Information Service. I’m a sophomore News, Magazine, and Writing major. As a student in the J54 class, I read for IRIS. I loved the impact such a simple service was having on the community. Reading the news for the blind and print handicapped helps people all over Iowa. And all I had to do was go to the basement of Meredith Hall and read the Council Bluff’s Daily Nonpareil! The first time I read I was super nervous. I figured I’d mess up and ruin the news for all those people. But with the help of the SLA who trained me, I read for an hour and enjoyed it. The worst part was that I forgot a water bottle and my voice was pretty sore afterwards. Now, when I train students, I always tell them to bring water—it’s a lot of reading after all. Students from the J54 class read for IRIS as a requirement of the course, but I like to make it more than that. Service isn’t about what you’re getting, a grade, it’s about what you’re giving. I try to stress that during trainings. In the booth, I tried to spice things up with a couple posters. One of them is a “5 W’s of IRIS” poster that reminds students of why they’re doing what they’re doing and who it’s for, and a whole lot of sparkle. The other one is a “reflection” poster. After they’re done reading, students can take a popsicle stick and draw a little face on it and put it on an outline of Iowa, representing someone in Iowa they’ve helped that day. It’s cheesy, but I think little things like the posters and upbeat training sessions remind the students that what they’re doing is important. They’re not just reading into a microphone in a booth in the basement, they’re actually helping real people.
