By Vincent Feeley | April 7, 2025 So far, my service here at Montana State University has been a very rewarding experience. I’ve been a part of a few large projects already that have really excited me, and being able to directly help students find housing has also been very worthwhile. Despite all of this, I have faced my fair share of challenges so far in my service. There’s been times when I haven’t been able to help students in situations that were beyond the scope of what I can offer, which can be difficult to process, and I’ve faced some communication roadblocks with some members of my team which made it difficult to come together for certain projects. However, the hardest challenge that I’ve faced so far, and that I’m still facing now, is accepting that I won’t be able to see many projects I’m working on to the end, or that they may fail to get off of the ground entirely.
Since I’m only serving at Montana State for less than a year, I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that some of the projects that I’m working on that I care deeply about, won’t be finished or implemented by the time I leave, and I’ll have to move on knowing that I need to leave them in other people’s hands to be completed and watched over. Another difficult reality that I’ve had to face is that some projects will never get out of the planning stage no matter how great they may seem, or that they may become a fully realized project, only to be shot down by higher level administrators who don’t share my team’s vision just before they can be completed. Before I began my service, I had some grand and perhaps naïve ideas of how easy it would be to begin and complete a project and have it be implemented by the University. I thought as long as I had a good idea and worked as hard as I could to help others see my idea in the same light that I did, I would be able to get any project I wanted off the ground and make it a reality. I now realize that, sometimes, no matter how great an idea is and no matter how many other people support your vision, there can exist constraints and barriers that no one can control or get rid of that won’t allow your idea to become a reality. Whether it be due to some policy that the University has, lack of funds, not having a large enough workforce, or a million other reasons, sometimes great ideas just can be achieved. Other times, you can bring some version of your idea to life, but only with extreme and significant revisions, which can sometimes feel even worse than not getting the project going at all, as it feels completely different to what you had initially envisioned, and it can feel like you’ve completely lost your initial project plan.
Although these challenges have been very difficult for me to deal with, and can still sometimes make me feel like I’m failing, it’s taught me so much in regards to project work and service. For starters, it’s made me much more resilient to the bumps in the road that I’ll inevitably encounter while working on a project. I realize now that there really isn’t such a thing as a project going smoothly, and having to deal with so many setbacks and roadblocks in my projects so far has prepared me to deal with them in future without feeling like it’s a failure on my part rather than a normal part of the process. I’m also now much more aware of how long projects can take to plan and implement, even the relatively simple ones. When I first started my service, I was thinking much more in terms of quantity when it came to how many projects I could complete, but I now understand it’s much more about their quality and how helpful they’ll be to those I’m serving, and that a good project has to take a while to plan and complete if it’s going to be fully realized and every possible contingency that could cause it to fail or be less helpful has been accounted and planned for.
I think the biggest lesson I’ve taken from my service so far however, is that my service and the projects that I help create and implement aren’t about me, and I need to decenter myself and my feelings from the process in order to do truly meaningful work. For example, maybe a project idea that I had needed to be significantly changed in order to be implemented, not because the initial idea was bad, but perhaps because it wasn’t as focused as it should have been, and therefore wouldn’t have been as helpful to those that I’m serving. And even if the new plan for the project is smaller in scope and less helpful than what I had originally planned, if changes need to be made in order to make the project a reality, it’s still better for those that I’m serving than having nothing at all. Decentering myself has also led me to realize that although it might feel less gratifying to me that I can’t see what I’ve worked on come to fruition, that’s not the point of the project in the first place, the point is to assist others in helping create a plan of action to serve the community. I’m just one piece of the very large puzzle that is service in the community, and the important thing is to play my part in ensuring that whatever plans and projects that I’m a part of are as good and realistic as possible so that they can be put into place. My role isn’t to take on the entire responsibility of a project, but to do what I can along with my fellow service members to ensure that positive change can take place in the community. These realizations have not only tempered my expectations on what to expect I can achieve during my service, but they have also given me a renewed sense of conviction to play my part and do what I can to serve, and to ensure that my primary focus is always first and foremost what I can do for the community and how best a project can serve them, not what project I think would be best.