LAAAADIES AND GENTAL MEN! I AM PROUD TO PRESENT TO YOU, THE ONE, HOPEFULLY THE ONLY, INTERNSHIP POL YOU HAVE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR... please click below to see my Internship Presentation of Learning which I shall be presenting once I return to the USA. Hopefully you'll be able to understand be through my jet lag. Enjoy!
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How was your work as an intern meaningful to your education and personal growth? Well, I guess more than anything, it taught me what I'm comfortable with. As fun as it was dressing up somedays, I really do miss my jeans and don't plan on wearing a suit 24/7 from now on. I also know that the sitting all day for research is not my thing. I get it, the point is to spread knowledge, but I want to run and frolic and, if I am going into a field that involves politics, be an activist rather than the one staring at a computer screen all day long. How did your view of life beyond high school change or develop during your time as an intern? It honestly, made me grateful. One thing that's different about Spain from the United States is the work ethic: You go to school, get a job working under someone for the rest of our life and then retire. And when I say job, I mean one that you're expected to get, like at your father's shop, not one that you've worked for and really truly enjoy. While sitting there in that room, I thought of how uncomfortable I was and how much I did not want to continue doing research forever and realized that, despite the fact that I was in a "high up" working environment, if I lived in Spain I wouldn't have a choice. I love Spain. It has taught me so much and given me confidence I didn't even know I could have, but the opportunities I have in the United States are rare ones, and I'm glad I can make a life there. How did communication and/or collaboration at work influence our understanding of professional working environments? Well for one, it told me I had to learn Spanish. Not only was I having trouble telling Maria what was going on, Maria was having trouble communicating what she wanted from me as well. I also learned that email is very important... like EXTREMELY important and that I should keep in open all the time because if I miss something I'm supposed to be doing, it's my fault for not checking. The last thing I learned about professional work environments is that, despite your discomfort, you don't matter as much as what you need to get done. Yes, your allowed breaks, but you better being working hard when you have an assignment because in a think tank, you have to get that information up professionally as well as ASAP. Project Examples:How was your work significant or meaningful to your workplace?
Well, I help develope the research that goes onto the blog and influences what and how they are going to write. Especially for the American perspective. I get asked to research a lot of the american think tanks and their reactions to certain events, such as the Greek Elections that occured this weekend on the 25th. How did your project(s) go from inspiration to final product? Explain the processes from the initial idea to the final product and the skills you used and developed. Well, I had several projects that came and went depending on what ithe experts needed information on. So in the end, though there were many final products, they weren't "inspired" by me. However, it took a lot of perserverance to complete everything that I did, whether it not interest me or it's a scary/sad thing to look at, or maybe even I just happened to be sleepy that day, I always found a way to get it done to the best of my ability. I also always found something interesting and new to learn about eachday and have a new found respect for research as well as the New York Times, which has been my book/bible for the last 4 weeks. Well, see this question is difficult because, honestly, everything I have been doing in internship I have done, in some simpler form, in school. Researching, typing essays and reviews, even the meeting last week was more of a question and answer discussion rather than a one sided conversation. I don't want to say that we can make what we write and how we research harder, because honestly, my head has been on the verge of explosion more than once, however, there does come a form of pride with every school related thing that I apply to the life I currently live in Spain. So I guess my answer to this question is not what we can apply to school, but how amazing it is that school applies elsewhere in ways that you didn't expect.
Today, I was asked to go to other peoples' blogs and comment as well as compare my internship to theirs. The three people I chose to visit were Lea Cello, Monica Vasquez and Mabel Aguilera. Lea and Mabel both chose to work at schools where Monica chose to work at a Doggy day care. What I've found different between my internship and theres is more passion oriented. Yes I find my internship entertaining and interesting however it is not my passion. Internship, for me, involves a lot of sitting and researching, and though I love the learning aspect of it, I do not find sitting in front of a computer screen all day as fun as taking care of animals or children. However, the more I learn about the world, and about myself in general, I come to find that there's so much more out there for me to discover. So it's ok if I don't know what I want to do right now because I might not know for a while. But I'm digging into what I might want to include in my life to come and that's what really counts.
Well, picture this.....
I sit in my small, cramped room, in front of my computer screen. Opposite me is Diana, to her right is Salva, and her left is Curro.... and we research. Literally, someone gives us a subject to study, a format for the information and a time limit and then we are set free to work for hours on end and possibly pause for a quick tea/coffee break at 12. So, to answer your question, there's not much of a difference from what I'm doing, however, what I am researching and how I do it can be extremely new to me. One difference between school and Elcano is my dress. My usual jeans a v-neck do not make an appearance. I wear nice dress suits or skirts/dresses and have to say, I feel so bundled up in clothing that I feel that it all could be some form of adult swaddling. The research, though similar to what Eli was going over for the last month of class, is pretty different as well. I'm in Spain so European issues occur more than those in the U.S. and it's just a-whole-nother world here. For example, there's a lot more on the Spanish Economic Crisis and La Casta (a political party) and how the Catalonians all wish to split from Spain where as when I was in America I heard lots more about Mike Brown and Police related news. The last and scariest difference between school and Internship is the fact that everything that I am doing is for someone else. I am not getting a grade for MY GPA, that I can use for MY college application, that's going to get me into a good college of MY choice. It's all for someone else and if they look bad, it's all MY fault. And me being the reason someone failed does not sound good at all. Otherwise, I feel pretty confident that school has prepared me well for this. Researching is something I have done way too much to not know how to do effectively. I think I'll do well. As I hear the door click, I pull it open and am washed in the warmth of the house. The pastel yellow walls seem to greet me, "Hello, welcome to your doom," the doom dwelling in the depths of my exhaustion rather than the place itself.
Being in Spain is wonderful; everything is clean and bright making the 25 minute walk I take to Internship every morning a beautiful one. I do not think these people realize how pretty the place they live in is. When I walk through the city, my eyes graze everything at least twice, trying to soak in as many details as I possible can, while the citizens of Madrid prefer to stare in deep concentration at the ground in front of them. Perhaps it is the cold nipping at their noses that keeps their heads low, or maybe the constant threat of dog poop on the side walk that I almost step in nearly every day. Either way, there so much to see, with not much time to spare. The night before I zombied into Elcano, I had gone to see the International Youth Orchestra with my fabulous aunt and grandmother. My aunt, Amy, had a friend playing with them that evening and said he was too brilliant not to see (in fact, he was rather brilliant, he plays guitar with hands of lightning). Anyways, though the orchestra only ran until 10, we ended up going home, taking showers, preparing for bed and next thing we knew, it was 11:30 (I know that's not that late but there's a nine hour time difference so my sleep schedule was already screwed up!) As I shuffled through the building, I paused at my mentor, Maria Solana's, office like I do every morning. "Hola, Santana, buenos dias!" She said with her usual stunning smile and tilt of the head. I was so tired I couldn't even comprehend the words. "Huh?" I said trying to remember what was an appropriate way to respond to "Good Morning". "It means Good Morning." And I had never felt dumber. I told her good morning, barely able to speak english, and walked down stairs into the tiny little room that was the Intern's sanctuary. Inside, Salva, one of the other interns of Elcano, went through his daily routine of attempting to teach me the Spanish language. "Ok, so what is it that you would like to know? Tell me..." he is very kind in letting me butcher his language. Oh well, at least I'm trying. As the other two interns, Diana and Curro, file into the room, we are a complete set and begin our exciting 6 hour journey staring at a computer screen all day. And, though my neck hurts and my back aches throughout the incredibly long day, I have never felt so, I guess involved. I don't read politics, or at least, not at home. They frustrate me too much. There are so many things that could go wrong, and I hate the whole refusal to compromise between the two main parties. We live in a country where we're supposed to embrace our differences, not pick one over the other. But alas, there's no way to bring everyone together yet so I'll just sit and wait. However, here I'm learning not only about politics all over the world (and might I add the comparisons between countries are extremely interesting) but I'm also looking at the economical differences and comparisons between each country as well as it's history and what news is currently happening in this time and day. I have never felt so informed and each time I learn something new, I feel a rush of actual excitement, not the sarcastic kind I used to describe my work earlier. Today, for example, I was asked to study the Nigerian school girls who got abducted last April by an Islamic group called Boko Haram. There were 273 of them on record, however, because girls from neighboring communities came to take their final exams, no one quite knows how many were actually taken. Some say well over three hundred. And though some of the girls managed to escape, there is still around 220 being held captive, although some people are assuming that they've been killed, sold into slavery (sex as well as labor), or even married off to one of the Boko Haram fighters. Just the other day, a 10 year old girl was forced to be a suicide bomber! And what's worse is that now that the fad has come and gone, no one knows about these things. No one cares! It was insane before, I mean those were innocent children that they had just taken away from their homes! If that happened to our children in America, we would riot until we all collapsed in a rage of patriotic fury. However, once we remembered that our children were safe, and that our children would not be abducted and forced to convert and marry these horrible men, we forgot and moved on, even when the same atrocities are happening eight whole months later. And that's awful. I am proud to be apart of an institute, even temporarily, that informs people of what's going on. Because people need to know, and not many people do. So yes, I was exhausted, my head was fuzzy from the light of my computer screen and my legs seem to have permanently gotten a soreness from sitting down hours at a time, but I am always excited about the work I do. And that's the best. Because I am interning at a place where multiple things are happening at once, you can expect that I will be doing multiple projects over the course of this month. For example, my first project included me researching the different reactions of American news papers ( New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and the think tanks Brookings and Council on Foreign Relations) about the Charlie Hebdo shootings last Wednesday. I have also been asked to help with when we meet with a Polish think tank next week, correcting english grammar as well as preparing for a meeting on youths in Spain, which will occur next Tuesday. I don't quite know what I'm going to work on next, but I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
However, I have never been more motivated to do well, more interested in the research I'm pursuing, and more excited about the possibilities that could occur. The people are wonderful and accepting and have explained their high goals regarding my Spanish with much enthusiasm. I am always learning new things, whether I have been assigned a job or not, and have discovered that I actually don't mind reading news papers, that I can, in fact, scroll through them for hours at a time and never grow too weary.
Over all, my first week, though stressful and nerve racking, has been full of new experiences and I am excited to see what next week has in store for me. Before I go, I would like to, very quickly, appreciate my Mentor, Maria Solanas, for helping me through my first couple days, and dealing with my crumby spanish. I promise I am improving :) |
Internship SummaryFor internship, Santana will being flying out to Spain to work at the Real Instituto Elcano, a Think Tank in Madrid. Archives
January 2015
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