Like many political science students, Noah Scholl went to college in the nation’s capital, hoping to become the next president of the United States.
He became immersed in religious studies and spent his penultimate semester living in a Buddhist monastery in India. Now, the Columbia Heights resident works as the engagement associate at George Washington University Hillel, less than a mile down the road from the White House.
“Especially later in college, I got very interested in religious studies, and ultimately, this idea of community building and religious spaces, and how … especially in globalizing times, community building is important,” Scholl said.
As a soon-to-be graduate, Scholl wanted a job that allowed him to work with and educate students, “not have to sit in an office from 9 to 5 every single day.”
“I got lucky and GW Hillel had an opening to work with students, to get to learn their stories and plan these fun events and stuff like that,” he said.
Scholl was encouraged to take up the job by both the executive director at American University Hillel, where he attended undergraduate, and a family friend who had worked at a chapter of Hillel.
Scholl plans GW Hillel’s social and cultural programming and meets students for “a ton” of one-on-one coffee chats.
“A third of my week is spent talking to students, just checking in on them, making sure things are going well,” Scholl said. “[Our conversations cover] everything from serious religious quandaries to their boyfriend broke up with them, or they’re dealing with a housing issue or something.”
He also plans events, having spent recent weeks preparing for GW Hillel’s third annual kosher food festival.
Scholl strives to host events that resonate with GW’s students. “We found a couple years ago that doing a big Friday night Shabbat dinner wasn’t necessarily bringing in all the students or wasn’t meeting them where they were in terms of what they were looking for for their Shabbat celebration,” he said.
So he refocused GW Hillel’s Shabbat model to include interactive events on Fridays, such as happy hour, paint and sips, challah making, trivia nights and flower bouquet making. These activities are known as “Shabbat Socials.”
“It’s fun social events where students can relax at the end of the week [and] do something they haven’t normally done before,” Scholl said.
He is currently organizing an upcoming carnival event, complete with cotton candy, slushies, lawn games, inflatable axe throwing and a pieing station. “Our students really enjoyed it [last year],” Scholl said.
Not too far post-graduate himself, Scholl tries to put himself in college students’ shoes when planning campus events.
“If I’m a student walking in and I don’t know anything about this program, this event, this Hillel, the space, what does it look like to me?” he asked. “Not only what gets them in the door, but is it open enough for them? Is it understandable … if you don’t know a lot about Judaism?”
Scholl pointed to his own nontraditional Jewish upbringing, attending a brand new Reconstructionist synagogue located in the basement of a Columbus, Ohio, church.
Scholl also leads various educational cohorts and connects unaffiliated Jewish students with GW Hillel staff members, fellow students and other opportunities to get involved.
“A lot of it is being publicly on campus, whether it’s tabling once a week, doing large-scale events, just being very public and front-facing as much as possible,” Scholl said of how he meets students who aren’t members of GW Hillel.
These connections can also manifest in unexpected ways. “Sometimes a student will just walk right up to me and [say], ‘What are you? I’ve never heard of Hillel before,” Scholl said.
While he said he loves all of GW Hillel’s students, Scholl takes extra care to make sure students new to Hillel are having a positive experience. He also considers that everyone comes from a unique background, even within the Jewish community.
“Working with students from so many different backgrounds — students who grew up in a Jewish day school, students who are from Australia and have never really been part of a Jewish community before, and students who are from the South, where maybe they were the only Jew in their high school — I try to make sure that I do my best to appreciate the backgrounds so many people are bringing,” Scholl said.
Honoring a diversity of perspectives brings Scholl back a lesson he learned from a teacher in India.
“The whole class was staring at a tree, and he was like, ‘There’s not one tree there. There’s 20 trees. Everyone is seeing a different tree,’” Scholl recalled. “It makes event planning super fun — trying to envision all of the different ‘trees’ that everyone is seeing and making sure that [events] are both accommodating and accessible for everyone, and they’re fun and enjoyable.”
In Scholl’s opinion, the purpose of life is to build community and exist together, something he realized upon leaving his Ohio home to attend American University.
“Most people who come to D.C. schools don’t know anyone coming here,” Scholl said. “They’re restarting themselves in a way. I remember being that freshman student, [as] my parents were leaving, being like, ‘I don’t know anything here; I don’t have anything here,’ thinking how daunting it was that I have to find a way to build that myself.”
So he works to create that community for other college students. It’s a far cry from the Oval Office that he once envisioned, but that’s fine with Scholl.
