深职院百名学生义工服务文博会

    Anna Zhao

    anna.whizh@yahoo.com

    Visitors to the 9th China (Shenzhen) International Cultural Industries Fair (ICIF), held Friday through Monday at Shenzhen Convention and Exhibition Center and subvenues across the city, may have noticed the pervasive presence of red-vested student volunteers helping people find their way around.

    This was the eighth consecutive year in which Shenzhen Polytechnic students have volunteered at the ICIF. One hundred students, including freshmen and sophomores, helped out at this year’s event.

    Volunteering for the ICIF is not a simple task. All of the volunteers underwent a strict selection process, including interviews and trainings. To qualify for an interview, students had to speak well, show good manners, be familiar with all of the halls at the convention center and be able to react swiftly to emergencies.

    But the most important quality for volunteers, said Huang Junni, secretary general of the school’s volunteer association, was teamwork and a mindset of providing good service.

    “Everything we do must follow good manners because we represent Shenzhen Polytechnic,” Huang said.

    Some volunteer positions also required good foreign language abilities.

    Volunteers received pre-ICIF training in areas including basic facts about the event, proper manners, notices, precautions, hand gestures and polite words. Huang said some seemingly trivial details that may be unnoticed by most people, such as body language, required particular effort to correct.

    Volunteer work began at 8 a.m. and ended at 4:30 p.m., without a mid-day break, each day of the ICIF. Many students had to get up a little after 5 a.m. to depart from the school at 6:10 a.m. Volunteers joined a morning meeting prior to each day’s work and a conclusive meeting after each day to share experiences and examine defects.

    Huang said thanks and recognition from ICIF visitors brought her great joy and encouraged her team.

    Shenzhen Polytechnic has 40 professional volunteer teams that serve different places and purposes, such as Metro volunteers and food safety supervision volunteers. A total of 13,000 students have registered as volunteers.

    Students said they can strike a balance between study, leisure and volunteering.

    “College life without experiencing something meaningful is incomplete,” Huang said, adding that she had gained friendships with other volunteers.

    Zou Wenjing, a freshman, said volunteering greatly enriched her college life and she enjoyed the teamwork. Zou said college life has a very fast pace and she rarely meets people other than her classmates, but volunteering enables her to come into contact with many people.

    “It may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to volunteer at the ICIF and I have learned something that is not available on campus,” Zou said.