Award-winning New York Times columnist and author Nicholas Kristof visited campus Monday and left the crowd with one request.

Change the world.

Kristof changed the world by exposing injustices, both at home and abroad, and sharing them with readers around the globe. While not everyone can travel to all 50 states and 150 countries, or buy two girls in Cambodia to remove them from being sold, everyone can take a small step to make a difference.

Seems like a pretty tall order, right? With all the things that students juggle — school, a social life and work — it’s easy to get bogged down and be too concerned with the bigger picture.

But something that students should understand is that the world could mean different things to different people. The world could be the literal world. But it could also be your town, your neighborhood, floor or dorm room.

It’s not necessarily about changing the entire world. It’s about making a difference for one individual.

Kristof shared a few tips on how to best change your world:

Get out of your comfort zone

Iowa State has a wide variety of clubs and organizations focused on volunteering and service work that take incredible steps toward changing our community for the better. Dance Marathon, for example, is a fun and easy way to help children with devastating diseases. Students Helping Our Peers is an organization that helps ISU students in need of food assistance. Wishmakers on Campus raises money and awareness to grant the wishes of local Iowa children who have life-threatening medical conditions. Smile Ninjas are silent day makers who change campus with one strike of a smile at a time.

Travel

Traveling overseas isn’t always an option in everyone’s budget, but an alternative Spring Break trip is an easy and possibly eye-opening way to make a difference for many people or an entire neighborhood. Even Ames and Des Moines contain neighborhoods with people in need of food and companionship. International Student Volunteers is an organization that takes travel and volunteering and merges them into one convenient package. Students can travel to places like Australia or Thailand for two to five weeks to volunteer with animals or communities while discovering their adventure spirit.

Empathy

The ability to understand and share the feelings of another person is a powerful personality trait. Looking at a situation from another perspective is the type of quality that will not only benefit you during your student life, but your adult life as well. Understanding someone’s feelings and creating a dialog with them is just one of the many ways being empathetic is a benefit in a professional capacity.

Getting out of our comfort zone, in any of these ways, benefits you just as much as it could someone else, a community or maybe even the world.