2 AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF

When a student participates in a service break trip, a process called reorientation occurs after the trip is over, when the student is trying to connect what they’ve learned on the trip to their normal lives. The objective of this project was to explore the concepts of volunteerism, community service, service learning, and alternative break trips, and to determine whether a reorientation process is important for making a student’s experience more meaningful and what specific parts of a reorientation are important. 12 service break leaders participated in a survey about the reorientation process at their school. The surveys were conducted in an interview fashion and the data was analyzed to extract major themes about reorientation and its importance. Every person interviewed indicated that their school’s program did include a planned reorientation as part of the overall process and believed that it was important to help students translate what they’d learned about community and service to their own lives back home. The participants gave many parts of reorientation that they felt were important. There were variations due to the size of the program, the type of school, and the experience level of the participants. However, four important concepts were cited by all the participants: planned reflections, a planne