Graduation requirement: 480 hours of service

The Universidad de Monterrey (UDEM) is an institution that has a profound orientation towards service. In fact, the university’s motto reads “humans only achieve self-fulfillment when in service of others”. As a result of that basic principle, each and every one of the institution’s students has to do 480 hours of compulsory service in order to be able to graduate. The Universidad de Monterrey can actually guarantee that a 100% of its students do a certain type of service during their time as a student.  This might very well seem like a perfect solution since service is a great way to learn about many different topics: democracy, culture, tolerance, social conscience, commitment, etc. Precisely because of those possible benefits of service, UDEM has dedicated a good amount of time and effort into managing the projects on which students work, along with the relation with the community partners.

The project that has become the pride and joy of the institution is the Preparatoria Politécnica (Politecnic High school). This high school is located in a low-income area, where very little education is offered and where a big percentage of the population is uneducated. The high school has a proportionally small amount of hired faculty, most of which are the heads of divisions and the principal. Over 40% of the teachers are university students from UDEM. The students commit to teach a class for a year in a certain grade of high school. Before they begin teaching, UDEM’s students are trained on their students’ context and level of knowledge. During their semester as teachers UDEM’s students learn about other different problematics and they become engaged with their students’ reality. Suddenly the problems of the community become a cause UDEM’s students care about.  It is rather common to have UDEM’s students staying at the high school for longer than a year as volunteers in order to continue working. However, the success that this project has had is not even throughout all the projects on which UDEM’s students work.

One of the greatest challenges of UDEM as an institution is to be able to evaluate each of the service projects on which the students work with the purpose of guaranteeing the quality of the service process that the students experience. It is a reality that while some students have a profound service experience such as the Politecnic High school, some of the students end up doing social service that is perceived by the student as pointless. The University has been setting different strategies into place to avoid that last scenario, but the quality of the service projects are still far from even. The reflection that results from this reality is quite complex though. UDEM is very aware that a bad service experience can be potentially more harmful that having no service experience whatsoever. And while having a compulsory amount of service per student seems like the solution to the absence of the experience, UDEM is also more prone to having an uneven quality on service experiences because of the amount of options it needs to provide. So the questions that remain to be answered and on which there is constant work from the institution is: how can UDEM simplify the process and increase the overall quality of the social service projects on which the students work? How can UDEM guarantee a valuable experience for its students? What strategies are other educational institutions implementing?