Community Engagement and a Save the World Mentality

     During the discussion about community engagement, attention was brought to the concept of community engagement within the university environment. On one hand maybe college should be an isolated place in which we learn, so that then once we graduate we should theoretically have the knowledge to be able to go out into the world and envision how it should work and impose action at that point. However, from the opposing view perhaps we should introduce students to community engagement throughout their college career and expose them to real world problems that then may be solved through collaborative effort made possible by an environment which promotes that.
Though I agree that a college education should provide us with a foundation of knowledge before we impose our ideas on the world, I also see a lot of appeal in being given the opportunity to ignite actual change. One of the issues brought up with the community engagement model was that it seems there aren't enough students who would be interested. I however, disagree. Maybe I am an outlier, but the biggest appeal I found in the idea of community engagement was that it would give me a platform to create meaningful change. I feel that if community engagement was designed in such a way that students and professors collaborated together on projects, that this collaboration and opportunity for guidance from professors would help to provide a solution to the poorly imposed change that uneducated enough, students may be subject to making. I also believe this collaboration would introduce a new and exciting way of learning that would interest students and encourage participation.
College is a time when students are deciding who they want to be, and what they want their careers to look like. Those sorts of decisions require a certain level of inspiration, I feel that's not lacking from the university community. Given the right tools to orchestrate change, especially within the fields they're interested in, I think students would take the opportunity. We might not be able to save the whole world, and we know it, but if at any time we're interested in doing just that anyways, I think college is it.