While many alums leave college and trudge into the workforce immediately, one former student chose to bike across the country, paving a new road.
Harrison Goldspiel '13 chose to spend his summer in a program called Bike & Build.
The organization was founded in 2002 as an expansion of a cross-country bicycle challenge organized by Habitat for Humanity at Yale University. Habitat for Humanity is an international non-profit that works to combat the issue of homelessness all over the world by building affordable housing.
The program features eight different cross-country routes that riders can choose from. During the journey, riders stop and assist various organizations, including Habitat for Humanity, in their mission to build affordable housing for residents of low-income neighborhoods in America.
Goldspiel chose the Northern U.S. route ,which covered a variety of American landscapes like New England, the Great Lakes, Glacier National Park, the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Northwest. Goldspiel began his journey with 29 other bikers in Portsmouth, N.H. and finished the ride in Vancouver, Canada.
"Through biking trips focused on community service, Bike & Build benefits affordable housing and empowers young adults for a lifetime of service and civic engagement," according to its mission statement.
Goldspiel believed that his passions would be best suited for the physical work of "biking across the country and working on affordable housing" with Bike & Build.
Participants of the program must train rigorously by biking 500 miles and doing 10 hours of volunteer work at the housing organization before joining the summer-long cross-country biking journey. Members of this trip travel to various rural communities in need of affordable housing assistance.
Goldspiel explained that the build site "can be a house, it can be a local garden or it can be some sort of housing development project ... we would always work with other organizations. Usually we would work with local Habitat for Humanity chapters."
Other organizations that the Bike & Build members worked with include Cover Home Repair, a Vermont-based organization that assists with repairs on low-income housing; Community Action Inc., a non-profit in Wisconsin fighting poverty by focusing on long-term benefits including urban development; and Hope Village, a North Dakota organization that is working to revitalize homes that were damaged in a flood in 2011.
As another part of the pre-departure requirements, each Bike & Build member had to fundraise $4,500. Having worked at the Phonathon at Brandeis, Goldspiel was up for the challenge. "I wrote over a hundred letters to family and friends, sent out many emails and Facebook messages and asked businesses in Waltham and at home for their support," Goldspiel said. A portion of the money went toward the bike cost. Bike & Build distributed the rest of the money in three ways: competitive grants, which were allocated by participants of Bike & Build to organizations that apply, non-competitive grants donated to organizations that provide the cyclists with materials and services and rider donations by each individual rider to an organization of their choice. Goldspiel decided to donate his $500 to Waltham Alliance to Create Housing, an organization in which he was very active during his time at the University.
In terms of housing for the members of the trip, living conditions consisted mostly of churches that hosted them for the night. On one occasion, they stayed in a synagogue, a night that Goldspiel fondly remembers. "Everybody kept asking me what to do in the synagogue and if I'm going to go to a Shabbat service. They didn't know it wasn't Shabbat. That was really fun."
On a typical day, "we would follow directions and do any sort of tasks like framing, painting, insulating, landscaping, roofing and demolition," Goldspiel said.
Goldspiel faced a number of challenges along the way including poor weather conditions, fatigue, harsh riding terrains and worst of all, Giardia, a gastrointestinal bacterial infection that left Goldspiel feeling tired and weak. "Being sick brought me down a lot because you don't want to be sick ... you want to ride. That's why you do Bike & Build," he said.
Feeling the effects of homesickness, Goldspiel admitted that there was a week when he just didn't want to ride. "I wanted to do nothing ... I wanted to go home, to be honest, ... but eventually I passed over that. I got back to my normal, happy self," Goldspiel said.
Goldspiel also explained the challenge of going on this adventure immediately after graduation without the chance to figure out his future plans. "It's hard to be in that state of uncertainty about your life. You're not grounded to school and you're not grounded to home, and you're anxious because you're always on the move," he said.
But despite occasional anxiety regarding his future plans, Goldspiel feels, overall, that his trip was the perfect alternative to what he deems a "typical post-college road trip."
He felt that it was the perfect combination of challenging and inspirational. He rarely felt physically overwhelmed because the trip was not professionally led and 90 percent of the riders had not been cyclists prior to joining.
This cyclist-humanitarian is thinking about what he will do next.
"I'd like to get more field experience in ecology, wildlife biology and land management ... I'm waiting to hear back from various jobs and AmeriCorps positions. Hopefully by October I'll be out in some other part of the country doing hands-on fieldwork," Goldspiel said.