The
fall has brought the chance for me to present to a wide variety of communities
on my internship experiences that I have had since starting at Wooster. Some of you may have read my blog posts about
my internship at Adelante Mujeres this past summer- what you may not know is
that I was funded to do this internship by Wooster’s Lilly Project for
Vocational Exploration, which is now part of the APEX Fellows program. This included a
competitive application process, and once I was accepted, a number of
responsibilities came with getting funding for the internship. These included pre-internship orientation
sessions, reflection reports while completing the internship, and a post-internship
paper and re-integration sessions. One
additional post-internship requirement is giving a presentation on campus.
 |
| Part of our post-internship requirements include creating a photo journal (shown here) and a formal presentation. |
Instead
of just doing one presentation, so far I have been asked to do four presentations about my
Adelante Mujeres experience. These
include the local church’s vegan dinner, the Environmental Studies department’s
bi-monthly lunch session, an event for the college’s Board of Trustees, and the
class of 1963’s reunion committee meeting.
Not only did this give me a chance to practice presenting, but it gave
me a chance to reflect upon my internship with Adelante Mujeres and how it fit
in with my previous summer internships.
In
2010, I was one of Wooster’s first two urban agriculture interns with Green Corps in Cleveland, Ohio. Here I learned
sustainable agriculture techniques. This
internship really shaped the rest of my Wooster education and choices in major,
classes, and extracurriculars. (See some posts that I wrote for Wooster's sustainability blog about Green Corps here and here.)
In
2011, I learned a lot about social justice with Wooster’s Global Social Entrepreneurship (GSE) Program (this is when this blog started). Here I learned cross-cultural communication
skills, project management, and how to multi-task, among other things.
I
took the skills from Green Corps and GSE, as well as the passions for
sustainable agriculture and social justice that I had developed, with me into
my Adelante Mujeres experience. I
refined and expanded these skills, as well as learned new things about my
community. Telling this story to others
has been a significant part of my fall at Wooster thus far.
