Senior Transfers Passion For Service to UC Merced

Since a young age, Neal Bharadwaj has been driven to give back to the community. He remembers his parents taking him places to volunteer when he was a child.

“My parents instilled in me a creed to help others,” said Bharadwaj, a senior bioengineering major. “Giving back was something I learned early on.”

While other students at his Fremont high school were struggling to complete their required 40 hours of community service, Bharadwaj completed more than 1,300 hours by volunteering at Stanford Hospital, Masonic Home for Adults, Niles Canyon Challenger Little League and Jeena, a Los Gatos based nonprofit organization, among others. He discovered that helping nonprofit organizations that supported the needs of disabled children was especially rewarding.

During his sophomore year of high school, Bharadwaj founded Matters of Community (MOC), a nonprofit focused on enhancing self-esteem and improving the integration of special-needs children into mainstream community through music, arts, theater and sports.

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