Ask HN: How has volunteering helped you grow?

First lesson: middle schoolers (think 11 - 14 years old) will test your patience in new and completely unimagined ways, if you don't have kids of your own. They will also surprise you in a bunch of wonderful ways too. I had to learn how to corral their attention, navigate their relationships with each other, and motivate them to actually get stuff done. Turns out it was great training for being a supervisor later on :)

Second lesson: I had to learn about flight, more than I'd ever before, and figure out how to teach it. I don't think I did this very well, to be honest, but five years after graduating school it was nice to teach myself something that wasn't tech-related.

Final lesson: I had to learn to accept there were things I could not fix. As an engineer and inveterate tinkerer, this is hard for me to come to terms with. Even in the affluent area I lived in, and with kids who had all volunteered for this after-school activity, we had kids with serious home issues, kids whose friends were dealing with hard personal problems, and at least one violent outburst. I saw the kids for ninety minutes a week; the best I could do was make a welcoming and safe environment for them. That has never really sat well with me.

My job changed, and now I travel too much to coach anymore. It's my biggest regret about the change. I miss working with those kids.

After that I was asked to be chair of Cycle Bath and over the last 3 years I’ve taught myself about transport, helped the council win millions in funding, and made cycling a key agenda item locally. I’ve learnt a lot about social media, public engagement and how to work with councils.

My proudest moment was cycling along a towpath I’d fought hard to have upgraded to a 4 season wheel friendly surface, even having police protection at a meeting, and seeing people in wheelchairs using it. It brought home that much of the cycle advocacy is just about making public space easier for people, particularly kids and people with mobility issues, to get around independently.

Recently I created a transport tube map for Bath and this resulted in a national series of workshops teaching people how to make this key campaigning tool for cycle advocacy groups and even some council officers.

I’ve begun to apply my IT skills to analyse UK Census 2011 commuter flow data and model modal split flows within the city. This piece of work might go national in the next couple of weeks due to some of the analysis I’ve been able to do. (Cycling and Walking can be hugely under-represented in the stats that councils use for transport planning.)

I’m now thinking of running for council in 2019 and hopefully getting the transport brief. It’s considered a bit of a poison chalice but personally I cannot see a better way to help improve the city which has been my home for the last 16 years.

If somebody had told me in 2010, that that one cycle ride home would have lead to this, I simply would not have believed them. What I will say is that I almost wish I could get paid to do this full time, but thankfully IT consultancy seems to give me the time to do this for now.

[edit] A lot of what I've written on the subject can be found here https://cyclebath.org.uk/author/awjreynolds/

I wasn't thinking anything like "This will look great on my resume" or "Wow, C, so elite". More like, "How can I add this new fireball spell? Which similar code can I copy?"

Before you know it, things like pointers and memory management were second-nature. Skip ahead a decade and a half, when I left academia for industry, suddenly those silly gaming days are more important than my university years!!