IPS is hosting its inaugural career week, beginning today. Hopefully this is old news — students, IPS staff, and alumni have been hard at work with scheduling logistics, flyers, and food orders for the past month, if not longer. Any of the speaker events (say, for example, with Courtney Bettle of Baltimore City Public Schools or Paul Messino of DHMH) would count for a seminar credit.

If you have specific questions about Career Week, email Kristen Cooksey '12, IPSSA's alumni committee czar at cooksey.kristen@gmail.com. I'm listing the full Career Week schedule below. Before I do, however, here are a few other IPS-related events also scheduled for the week of March 5-9: 

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IPS will once again be forming a team to participate in JHU's Relay for Life! Relay for Life is an American Cancer Society (ACS) fundraising event to support cancer research, prevention, and patient and survivor services. The IPS team page is http://main.acsevents.org/goto/IPS. By clicking here, you can sign up to raise money, donate to the team if you are unable to participate, and learn more about ACS and the Relay. 

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Earlier this month, the Open Society Institute-Baltimore awarded IPS alumna Jill Pardini '11 one of its prestigious Community Fellowships. The fellowship will enable Pardini to improve and expand the Baltimore chapter of Soccer Without Borders, a chapter she founded. Pardini's organization offers tutoring and mentoring to teenage boys from the local refugee population, using soccer as the lingua franca. Below is an edited interview with Pardini about her nonprofit and the community fellowship. 

For anyone interested in seeing Pardini and her players in action, her 16-and-under boys team is competing for a medal position in its Maryland Soccer Association league at 11:45 a.m. tomorrow (Nov. 13) at North Point Government Center. 

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On a cool Saturday morning Oct. 1, when most Hopkins students were still fast asleep, we five IPS Honeybadgers ran a 5K race around Lake Montebello. (Yes, our team name was the IPS Honeybadgers.) Some of us were there to race and some to cheer, but we all came in support of Marian House.

"While normally we focus on direct-service events, today was an opportunity to participate in a community event,” said Morgan Cole, co-chair of the IPS student volunteer committee (and a racer that day). “We helped bring awareness to an important issue and a great organization that assists homeless women and children in Baltimore."

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Zeke Berzoff-Cohen '12 is overseeing a candidate forum for Baltimore City's mayoral primary election Aug. 10. The event is free, open to the public, and any first-year IPS students should consider this an opportunity to learn more about urban politics in Baltimore. 

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Here's a follow-up to President Ron Daniel's announcement about Johns Hopkins' new community engagement internship program.

Apparently, Hopkins isn't the only local college pushing community service as an extracurricular learning experience. WYPR's Tom Hall interviewed staff from the Maryland Institute College of Art and Goucher College, both of which have community engagement programs.

In early May, the IPS student association's community service committee discussed similar efforts its students could undertake. Starting in the Fall 2011, students will be required to attend one community service event per year. Students can also replace one of three required seminars with a community service event. The committee is exploring opportunities to establish long-term service relationships in addition to the one-time events it arranged this past year.

What do you think IPS students could do for its community? Feel free to comment at the bottom. 

IPS Blogger J.B. Wogan '12 is a first-year student at the Institute for Policy Studies. Email him at jwogan2@jhu.edu.

Johns Hopkins University President Ron Daniels announced a new initiative this morning that matches 25 undergraduate students with nonprofits and agencies "doing good work across the city." The eight-week program will set students on a variety of tasks, such as assisting in disaster planning for emergency shelters, helping with a campaign to modernize public school buildings, working at a clinic serving the uninsured, and running afternoon activities for Baltimore children.

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The IPS Community Service Committee is at it again: Trading in sleep and study time for a good cause. This time, students are cleaning up the Bread and Cheese Creek as part of a volunteer event sponsored by the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay. The event is scheduled for Saturday, April 2 at 8 a.m. in the Berkshire area of Baltimore County. Email ipssa_service_committee@googlegroups.com for more information. 

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To kick off community service events for 2011, IPS students visited the Helping Up Mission Feb. 18. Students toured the mission in the morning and learned about the non-profit’s scope of services. At noon, they served lunch to the non-profit’s clientele, homeless men.

“Not only does it fit within the mission of our program but the greater Hopkins community,” student volunteer Jill Pardini ’11 said. “Service events are great opportunities in the busyness of student life to take a step back and remember the people that are actually affected by the policies we hope to impact.”

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We study policy solutions for social problems all the time. Come see one in action.

The IPS student community service committee has its first event of 2011 scheduled for Friday, Feb. 18. Students are invited to help serve lunch at the Helping Up Mission, a homeless shelter that offers a long-term residential “spiritual recovery" program for men with drug and alcohol addiction.

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