Ask HN: How has volunteering helped you grow?

Thanks! Been working for an year now (graduated last year), just want to try out new things! :)

I wanted to bring a different perspective to what everyone else has been sharing.

I volunteer with a program assisting refugees from Syria. I met people who have had to undergo the worst that humankind has to offer. I met men, women, and children who have been shot, amputees, children suffering from PTSD, etc.

I learnt of stories of 10,000 missing children, some of whom were taken from the beaches of Greece by smugglers. Some of them would put themselves in the human chain of people assisting refugees disembarking boats.

I had to come to terms with refugees who acted selfishly and had learnt to hoard everything they could get their hands because that's how you survive living in refugee camps. I judged them, then felt guilty about judging them.

I am yet to find anything positive coming from this experience. It screwed me up. I went through panic attacks and had to get therapy.

I volunteered to start/run a podcast for the Linux Mint community[1]. I helped host, edit, and hosted the site from 2009-2011. I stopped at episode 50 because I had a kid and went back to school. Near the end of 2010 there was a call for writers for a website I was reading at the time[2] and it even paid money ($20/article). I had no writing experience except for random posts I put on my personal blog at the time. I was told later that a main reason they hired me was because of my podcasting experience.

Because of the podcast I got plugged into more of the Linux community and started attending and occasionally speaking and volunteering at my local Linux conference[3]. A couple years later I was looking to make a jump from low level manager to sysadmin. I had no professional sysadmin experience but I had these two "hobbies" I put on my resume which ended up landing me the job.

My first year at the conference (2008?) I met some people who I got along with and saw them almost every year at the conference for ~5 years. In 2014 they asked if I was looking for work (I was) but I had only been a sysadmin for ~10 months and had no other professional experience outside of helpdesk roles and manager. They hired me because of my pitiful 10 months of experience and all the additional areas where I showed expertise (podcast, writing, speaking).

I've been at the new job for 3 years now and my name is in movie credits for Oscar winning films which is something I would have never expected. I've grown a lot in every new opportunity I've been lucky enough to have.

[1]: http://mintcast.org [2]: https://www.howtogeek.com/author/rothgar/ [3]: http://socallinuxexpo.org/