Service is joy – assistant professor connects hundreds of problem-solving undergrads with the community

Assistant professor Mayu Nishimura found what was missing from her courses during the 2023 YWCA Hamilton Women of Distinction Dinner.

Dr. Sonia Anand – a McMaster colleague and professor of medicine and epidemiology – was one of seven trailblazing women receiving awards that night. In her acceptance speech, Dr. Anand thanked her parents for putting service to others on equal footing with pursuing personal and professional excellence.  All three are important and deserve equal attention, Anand told the audience.

She also shared a family-favourite quote from Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”

Anand’s speech inspired Nishimura to build community engagement into her two undergraduate courses in applied psychology. “What does Mac stand for? We’re a university that brings brilliant minds together to solve problems and answer questions. I wanted to leverage that in my courses, with students coming up with solutions and answers for the community.”

Nishimura made it her mission to find real-world problems for her students to tackle. The community projects needed to align with what students were learning in her courses and what they were personally interested and invested in – “you can’t force everyone to solve the same problem or just the problems that you personally find interesting.” With 300 undergrads in her two courses, Nishimura needed projects that were big enough so everyone could contribute in a substantive way. And the projects had to start and finish within a semester.

It was a tall order yet CityLAB Hamilton delivered on all fronts. It’s a long-running innovation hub that brings together students, academic and civic leaders to co-create a better Hamilton for all. Every year, CityLAB puts out a series of community problems in need of solutions – for the past two years, Nishimura has gone through the list and picked projects that check every box for her students and her courses.

Working community engagement into her courses has yielded big benefits for students, says Nishimura.

“For many students, it’s not just about making the grade – they want to make a difference while they’re at Mac. They’re looking for ways to authentically engage with the community beyond our campus.”

Students also learn two hard yet invaluable lessons when working with community partners. “Sometimes, there aren’t clear answers or perfect solutions. That’s not what students are used to when it comes to their assignments and exams where there are right and wrong answers. But that’s not reality – the world’s a complicated place where there isn’t always total clarity or easy answers.”

The greatest concern about assigning community projects yields perhaps the biggest benefit, says Nishimura. Failure is very much an option. There will be projects that go sideways and fall completely apart. It happened to one of the student teams in Nishimura’s third-year course.

They’d spent the entire term creating a social media strategy complete with series of posts to connect with a hard-to-reach audience. At the 11^th hour, the team was told they couldn’t use social media due to privacy concerns – the posts were scrapped and the strategy was never implemented.

“The students were disappointed. I was disappointed. But again, that’s reality and it’ll happen over and over again for students throughout their careers. So it’s important that students learn now how to deal with unexpected setbacks, get over their disappointment, adjust on the fly and come up with a Plan B, C, D or E. Students shouldn’t fear failure – the world won’t end if a project fails.”

CityLab hosts an end-of-year showcase where students are invited to present their work and share lessons learned. One of the students brought her mother to the event. The mother made a beeline for Nishimura. “I started to thank her for being there to support her daughter but she said that she was also there to thank me in person.”

The mother said working on the CityLAB project had transformed her daughter – she’d never been more motivated and the community project and Nishimura’s course were all she talked about. She said her daughter had found her purpose and passion.

For Nishimura, it was a heartfelt and unforgettable reminder that service is joy.