I didn’t have a job when I graduated from Alma College. I still don’t. I bought a plane ticket to Ecuador in May and that was as far as I got in making any kind of plan.

It wasn’t exactly the first time this had happened. In the summer of 2012, I had been awarded a grant to go to work at a nature preserve, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in Kenya for 2 months. But as we know, our plans are really just attempts to control what will happen in the future: so my program got cancelled and I ended up on a plane with 3 other Alma students to the western African nation of Sierra Leone to volunteer at Magbenteh Community Hospital.

The Sierra Leonean civil war had ended just a decade before and left over 70,000 people dead and thousands more maimed. I was in a different world—a world where having suffered from amputations, bullet wounds, loss of property and entire families was the norm. While the worst of the violence was 10 years behind them, still the remnants of war persisted in forms of pervasive psychological trauma, corrupt government, and lack of financial and human resources. I was here for a month in a place I couldn’t possibly understand at 18 years old. What could I do? I realized though, that focusing on what I couldn’t do wasn’t going to help anyone at all. Instead, I used my afternoons after volunteering at the hospital to travel around the village listening to and recording the stories of people’s wartime experiences—stories that, otherwise, may not have been heard. I couldn’t prescribe a cure, but I could listen and I could write.

Hearing these people drew me closer to an understanding of my own privilege—I happened to be born in a hard-working well-off family in a country where rule of law and peace were a given. I came to learn that, as an American college student, privilege is unavoidable and that my acknowledgement of and response to that fact would guide me the rest of my life. Privilege not only provides an opportunity but an obligation to devote resources and time to bettering our society with our growing population, escalating conflicts, and deteriorating natural environment.

And so my post-graduation plan is not a plan at all—it’s not a job or an internship or a concrete next step. It is a commitment to contributing my time and talents to efforts that fight poverty, inequality, environmental destruction, and other social injustices to level the playing field for people wherever I find myself in the world.