On Tuesday, March 7, University President Santa Ono gave his inaugural address to the University of Michigan. In it, he focused on setting an optimistic tone for his term, outlining his plans for DEI 2.0, achieving carbon neutrality and restoring the health of the U-M community. Through these bold ideas, he successfully energized students and professors, ushering in a new era of leadership. While the plans he discussed represent critical components of the University’s long- term success, his speech was noticeably light on details for short-term improvements that could make an immediate impact on student life. Though the University is known for its bold projects and wide reach, an overemphasis on major initiatives can often detract from basic improvements that are easier to achieve but still highly impactful. As Ono embarks on his first term, it’s imperative that he not allow the administration’s long-term focus to lessen its involvement in smaller-scale campus issues. One of the first areas the administration could make an immediate impact on is hiring resources. While certain colleges, such as the Ross School of Business, have access to extensive resources, including school-specific portals, industry- tailored career counseling and numerous major-specific recruiting events, many of the University’s other schools and colleges lack similar support. Though promoting student recruitment is critical for the University, it has made surprisingly little progress in allocating resources to other schools. Even in popular departments like economics and computer science, where students achieve starting salaries well above the median U-M undergraduate, most hiring is self-directed, with limited U-M involvement. The gaps in recruiting support across those majors are primarily filled by student organizations such as consulting groups and project teams, but other majors lack similar resources. In departments with more niche recruiting processes and smaller alumni networks, students are often left grasping for career guidance. With professors serving as major advisors for most students, undergraduates not pursuing academia often lack insight into industry recruiting processes. Since most professors haven’t worked outside academia, they’re typically ill-equipped to provide the type of support students need for other career paths. In order to improve U-M-wide recruitment, administrators should hire more industry- specific career counselors for each department and allocate greater funding toward organizing recruiting events that bring employers to campus. As one of the top universities in the country, U-M graduates are highly sought after across industries, so the University has an opportunity to make a tremendous impact through a concerted effort to connect more company recruiters with U-M students. In addition, by offering industry-specific career counseling, students would have the opportunity to meet with counselors who better understand recruiting timelines and networking strategies for their desired fields. Implementing these basic strategies could have an immediate impact on current undergraduates and significantly boost the value of a U-M degree. Further, compared to other long-term initiatives like carbon neutrality, the cost of hiring additional counselors and restructuring hiring support is relatively low, making it an easy area for the University to dedicate resources. Another critical area where the University falls short is its merit scholarship offerings. Though the University maintains an extensive financial aid program, it has only a small number of merit scholarships available. Especially when competing with other top universities for student talent, these programs serve as critical differentiators that convince top students to attend the University. In addition to their financial support, programs like the Stamps Scholarship offer students individual research budgets and internship funding that enable them to thrive at the University. Sadly, with the Stamps Scholarship being phased out and the Bell Scholarship and Bentley Scholarship among the few remaining at the University, most departments lack access to scholarship budgets that could help existing students and bring additional talent to colleges. In order to revitalize this critical component of the University’s undergraduate experience, the administration should work with donors and college heads to create department-specific scholarships for students. By doing so, the University would have an opportunity to cultivate talent through specialized grants supporting undergraduate research, internships and other programs. The final area where the University should dedicate immediate attention is the ongoing professor shortage across departments. As the student body has grown rapidly, several popular departments have been unable to keep up with hiring goals. As a result, many professors have been forced to teach increasingly large lectures, with individualized student attention suffering as a result. Opinion President Ono, let’s focus on immediate problems alongside long-term initiatives The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com 7 — Wednesday, March 22, 2023 NIKHIL SHARMA Opinion Columnist Stanford Lipsey Student Publications Building 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 tothedaily@michigandaily.com Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan since 1890. SHANNON STOCKING AND KATE WEILAND Co-Editors in Chief QUIN ZAPOLI AND JULIAN BARNARD Editorial Page Editors Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of The Daily’s Editorial Board. All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors. EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS Ammar Ahmad Julian Barnard Brandon Cowit Jess D’Agostino Ben Davis Shubhum Giroti Devon Hesano Jack Kapcar Sophia Lehrbaum Olivia Mouradian Siddharth Parmar Rushabh Shah Zhane Yamin Nikhil Sharma Lindsey Spencer Evan Stern Anna Trupiano Jack Tumpowsky Alex Yee Quin Zapoli JULIA VERKLAN AND ZOE STORER Managing Editors Debates on the Diag A ltruism is a characteristic that all graduate schools seek in potential candidates. It’s a soft skill that admissions committees find in students’ essays, extracurricular activities, letters of recommendation, interviews and lived experiences. After all, the way you use your free time says a lot about what you truly value and how you will contribute to your future profession. Historically, the most straightforward and sure- fire way undergraduates have demonstrated a commitment to serving others is through volunteering. For the past three years, for example, 92% of the University of Michigan Medical School’s incoming class had at least one community service experience listed on their application. While there is no hard and fast rule about what kind of volunteering looks the best on an application, the competitiveness of graduate school admissions has driven students to pursue larger-than-life and disingenuous volunteering projects. Volunteering at local food banks, nursing homes, hospitals and homeless shelters is no longer enough for aspiring professionals; when everyone and their second cousin is logging their hours at local organizations, many have felt compelled to take their free labor to places that will score them more brownie points. And thus, pre-med students have joined in the trend of voluntourism, a form of tourism in which travelers participate in volunteer work. Developing nations, in particular, are most affected by these undergraduate “saviors,” although the net impact of their “charity” work is often severely overestimated. Various pre-medical, pre-law and other pre-graduate school clubs and organizations on campus host alternative Spring Break trips and short summer trips to underserved areas to give their members an opportunity to gain volunteer experience. The U-M pre-medical club, for example, hosts a whopping eight- day alternative Spring Break trip to the Dominican Republic each year. Students participate in health education advocacy, the installation of water filters and the construction of structures that promote health. While well- intentioned, trips like these don’t do much to actually affect the long-lasting change that local communities need. Instead, students purchase plane tickets worth hundreds of dollars for a trip during a convenient time for them to witness enough disparities to blast on social media as a pivotal “I’m more aware now” moment. With the majority of the University’s student population being both white and in the top 20% for family income (as of 2017), I doubt that students have the language and professional skills to truly connect with indigenous populations and build lasting structures. In fact, a study of 162 Americans conducted after 1998’s Hurricane Mitch found that years after the Honduran natural disaster, their work in building houses didn’t even make a difference. Instead, the houses that didn’t fall over were given a price tag 10 times the annual salary of the average Honduran. It was also found that 15 times more houses could have been constructed had the Americans donated money instead of their time. And, sometimes, the damage from voluntourists had to be rectified by locals themselves. M-Heal, an engineering- focused club of over 250 students, prides itself on innovating health care technologies intended for underserved communities in countries like Ghana, Bangladesh and Mexico. However, many of their annual service projects occur during a series of one-week Spring Breaks. It is not believable that a group of 10-15 students can both gauge the landscape of health care needs of an entire community and “uncover” disparities from a days- long trip they are centered in. While M-Heal does have partnerships with local organizations in their target countries and spends the rest of the year designing technologies, their trips do not adequately entrench their group into the communities’ long-term needs. While it is quite venerable of them to have designed perioperative warming devices, portable exam tables and solar fridges, a community may have acutely different health care challenges in the span of just a few months. The 2014 Ebola epidemic illustrates this discrepancy. For over three years, West African countries were fighting a lethal and potent virus — one that had treatment centers overflowing and physicians rationing care. Collegiate health care and biotechnology groups previously working on projects related to, say, surgical innovations for this region, were deaf to the larger climate of infectious disease transmissibility and the precedent effect it would have. In their Michigan in Color column “The Problem with white saviorism,” columnist Victoria Tan succinctly characterizes organizations like M-Heal when she writes, “People participating in white savior behavior may also presume that they know better and hold all the solutions because their higher education makes them intellectually superior. However, it is more complicated than that. The issues the residents have been dealing with are not ones that can be fixed in a three-week getaway because they are the consequences of much more intricate problems.” They continue to cite author Pippa Biddle, who notes that during a high school service trip to Africa, her bricks were relayed in the night by local Tanzanians altogether so that the resulting buildings would stand correctly. While many other campus- specific examples remain, one common truth stands: the money used to cover lodging, travel and accommodation fees for voluntourists would be much better spent supporting local leaders whose physical presence can work to enact the grassroots change communities need. In the same vein, supporting local leaders shifts resources back onto the shoulders that know how to use them best. In this way, global aid is done with reverence to the thoughts, opinions and independence of the local community. The pandemic was an opportunity to see another way to run volunteering missions. International service organizations switched many of their positions to fully remote work, changing the invasive relationship between international volunteers and underserved communities. New tasks such as online fundraising, advocacy and administration from volunteers thousands of miles away contributed greatly to the efforts in host sites. For example, Habitat for Humanity, a Christian non-governmental organization focused on building houses, hosted successful “virtual builds” during the pandemic where volunteers connected asylees with information, coordinated staffing and raised money — all from their own homes. But online volunteering is just one way to put an end to treating projects in developing nations as an accessory. From Ann Arbor, students can produce journalism covering global disparities, organize food drives, lobby for foreign aid to underserved places, engage in workshops or advocacy panels, contribute to socioeconomic disparities research and even learn threatened languages. Not only are the possibilities to effect change from home endless, but local efforts also do not force aid; they redirect acknowledgements to on-the-ground volunteers and they place you where you are most useful. I’m confident that the interpersonal skills and experience garnered from the aforementioned initiatives will do just as much of a service for undergrads’ future endeavors as a short mission trip. We would find it bizarre if college students from impoverished countries spent eight days volunteering at the Maize and Blue Cupboard, and then offensive if they later wrote about their experience in graduate school applications as taking part in a heroic and life-changing endeavor for voiceless Americans. With this all-too-manufactured narrative about “helping impoverished people abroad” in mind, consider ways to make a difference in your home community. After all, local impact over four years ultimately empowers you to see projects through to the end — long after you’ve submitted your application to grad school. Voluntourism won’t get you into grad school MOSES NELAPUDI Opinion Columnist Design by Hannah Wilingham Design by Joanne Jung Flowers won’t do Read more at MichiganDaily.com