To get familiar with campus and the community, offer a helping hand to local nonprofit organizations, and get a leg up on making new friends before orientation even begins, more than five dozen incoming freshmen and transfer students and 14 upperclass team leaders have arrived on campus a week early to volunteer as part of the Cornell Public Service Center's Pre-Orientation Service Trips (POST).

Now in its 15th year, POST has provided almost 900 new Cornell students with a week of pre-orientation community service. This year, 64 incoming students are spending Aug. 16-20 working at more than 23 nonprofit organizations and schools -- from the Cancer Resource Center of the Finger Lakes, Challenge Industries and Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County to the Family Reading Partnership, Finger Lakes Land Trust and Sons of Civil War Veterans Association -- providing some 1,800 hours of community service. They spend their evenings getting acquainted and learning about the community.

"It's such an important program to have available for incoming freshmen, and I still look back on my experience as a participant and as a team leader as some of my best memories from Cornell," says Sarah Jensen Racz '03, who keeps in touch with POST program coordinators. "It's such important work!"

Besides volunteering, activities include a scavenger hunt and contra dancing on the Commons, bowling and a celebratory barbecue at a local park.

In addition, POST staff members have developed projects that address some of the issues specific to the Tompkins County community, including animal rights and rescue, accessibility, hunger and poverty, health care and aging, affordable housing and early literacy. The new students spend one day focusing on a particular issue. In addition to community service, they talk with agency staff and others to explore some of the root causes related to the issue and project, and how they can become involved in similar volunteer efforts while at Cornell.

"We hope that this early introduction will create some long-term and mutually beneficial relationships for both the participants and host organizations," says Renee Farkas, associate director of the Cornell Public Service Center.

The program is co-sponsored by TCAT, which provides assistance with bus passes and travel routes to transport the students to a different work site each day, as well as ShortStop Deli, which provides lunches for the teams.