Finding Direction with Help from Your Community

On Switchboard, users post “asks” and “offers”—they ask their community for what they need, and offer their community what they have to give. But when you post an ask, it can be hard to know exactly what you’re looking for. This success story is about Stephanie, and how her community helped her find direction even when she didn’t know quite what to ask for.

Stephanie posted on Switchboard because she felt more comfortable contacting members of her community, even if she didn’t know them, than she did contacting complete strangers on LinkedIn. “I’m not great at talking to people, and I find contacting and possibly bothering people I don’t know to be extremely difficult,” she says. “Switchboard is home to a community that I love and am familiar with, filled with people who are either just like me or expressly looking to help people like me, which is immensely reassuring.” Switchboard provides a space online where members of the same community can feel at home.

In her ask, Stephanie wrote that she was interested in everything from library science to law. She didn’t know exactly what to ask for, but she reached out to her community with faith that someone would be willing to help. “When I posted, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect,” Stephanie says. “I knew my ask was a bit vague. After all, my whole problem is that I’m trying to find direction.”

Stephanie’s ask paid off—two people, Lauren and Steve, contacted her through Switchboard and offered her advice. “The really excellent thing was that they both helped me with what they personally could share while also directing me towards my next step,” Stephanie says. “It’s a pay-it-forward kind of situation, and it carries on way beyond just that initial post and response exchange.” Now that Stephanie has found direction, she is not only in a position to post offers for her community in the future, but invested in giving back to her community by paying it forward.

Stephanie has become a Switchboard evangelist within her community, and every new Switchboarder she enlists makes her community’s Switchboard more useful. Stephanie recommends Switchboard to her friends “not only to get them started in meeting people and practicing making connections, but for selfish reasons as well—the more people who get involved in Switchboard, the more information, and the more useful it is to everyone.”

From Lab Help to Community Taxi Services

Mick is a junior biochem major. Over the summer, he had a lab internship working with a professor at school. Faced with hours of menial lab work, he turned to Switchboard to find help.

“It went super well,” he says. “I was able to reconnect with a friend who had been away and came back to Reed, and I hadn’t seen her in a while, and it was just a good vibe.”

Soon, Mick began to think of others ways he could use Switchboard—like for the informal taxi service he ran for his community. “The first Switchboard post was just so successful, I thought, ‘This is pretty neat, people actually use it, so maybe I should use it more,’” Mick says. “So I gave it a shot.”

After posting an “offer” about his taxi service on Switchboard, Mick began driving alumni in addition to the students he’d already been taking to and from the airport around school breaks. “The best part was definitely meeting a ton of Reedies, both currently enrolled and alums who I would not have otherwise been able to meet. I got to know the freshman class a lot better, and recent grads, and even people who are friends of alums. It’s great for indirect networking.”

Many students and alumni use Switchboard to find jobs and internships or look for places to stay around the world. But Mick found that Switchboard offers everything from extra lab hands to potential taxi clients.

“It’s surprisingly diverse,” says Mick. “It’s not just about finding a place to stay or some kind of internship. There’s a lot of things where we could use a helping hand or that we could offer, and it’s nice to know that there’s an extensive network out there for you.”

Switchboard unleashed the altruism of Mick’s community, and he found more than just a concrete reward. He found inspiration. “There’s a whole ocean of possibility out there, and the flood gates are open,” Mick says.

Making Offers a Community Tradition

This story is about Greg.

Greg ‘96 works for a technical translation company in Boston. He majored in political science at Reed College, where he founde “HumPlay” in 1994, a “comedy revue which lovingly skewers Reed’s required Humanities 110 course” that has been performed at Reed every year since.

When Greg found out in August that his company was having trouble finding people to hire as proofreaders, Greg says, “I thought of the Reed Switchboard, especially since the freelance proofreaders could be located anywhere in the world with an internet connection.”

So Greg posted an offer. It was a huge success.

“The response we got from the posting was enormous,” says Greg. “I believe that 19 different people contacted me, ranging from new grads to people with professional editing experience. I passed every response to our Quality Assurance coordinator. She contacted many of the people interested, sent some the proofreading test we use to evaluate proofreaders, and wound up adding two people who scored high to our freelance proofreader list, and we hired one new grad who was moving to Boston for grad school for a part time, in-office position.”

Net result: Three members of Greg’s community found jobs, and Greg filled gaps at his company.

Would he use it again? Greg says, “Posting positions to the Switchboard was definitely useful. The response was more than I could have imagined. I’ll definitely post again when the need arises.”

And so Greg, creator of HumPlay, is helping a new tradition take root at Reed: posting offers on Switchboard.