It’s hard to believe that this year’s Extraordinary Community Service Award winner was once a shy freshman who felt most at ease inside her Parkside dorm room.

Flash forward four years, and Yvonne Tam is now the coordinator of the largest student service day on campus, the founding executive board member of the outreach program Community Health Involvement Project and a four-year participant in Alternative Spring Break, through which she traveled the country to perform service work.

And it all started at Norwood Street Elementary School, where she tutored through the Joint Educational Project during the second semester of her freshman year.

“I realized that community service is a good way to get to know your neighborhood and to feel safe and connected,” said Tam, who came to USC from Hong Kong, where she grew up speaking Cantonese. “I liked stepping out of my comfort zone.”

That same spring, she signed up for an Alternative Spring Break trip to Death Valley, where she said she was pushed further outside her comfort zone than ever before.

“It was the first time I ever had to speak English 24/7, so it forced me to interact with new people,” she said. “I really opened up on that trip.”

When she came back to campus, she dedicated herself fully to her new community. During her junior year, the newly minted health promotion and disease prevention major began working in the USC Volunteer Center, facilitating student outreach events such as Friends and Neighbors Day.

She devoted several days a week to the University Park Health Center’s student resource room, providing anonymous HIV testing and counseling and answering questions ranging from dieting concerns to sexual health.

That same year, Tam helped establish the Community Health Involvement Project. She and her co-founder trained USC students to raise awareness throughout the community about good health practices and to administer free blood pressure measurements.

Tam’s latest contribution to USC is Service Buddies, a program she co-created this year, pairing USC volunteers with high school students at nearby Gertz Ressler High School to instill the importance of being a civically engaged citizen.

“I want to show them how volunteering lets you see an urban problem firsthand and allows you to work toward solving it,” she said.

This fall, Tam will begin studying at The Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, pursuing her dreams of addressing health issues in developing countries.

“It all fell into place for me,” she said of her journey through college. “Everything clicked when I discovered how service can mesh with public health.”

For all the stories on this year's Commencement, click here.