Guest Blogger Reilly Anderson

I applied for the Clinical Care Extender internship because I want to be a doctor, and Cope Health Solutions gives their volunteers the unique, immersive opportunity to be trained and involved in patient care–almost to the extent of a certified nursing assistant—with less experience.

During this summer rotation, I worked in the Definitive Observation Unit, which also included the Neuroscience Unit. I learned how to connect and monitor heart leads on patients, take vital signs, change, discharge, move, walk, and bathe patients. I got the opportunity to work with patients who have suffered from cardiac arrest, strokes, and other heart and brain related health problems. This summer I learned a lot for my skillset and I was able to narrow down my career path.

I found that working with stroke and cardiac patients is not my calling. While I enjoyed the patients who connected with me and I learned a lot about how to have a good bedside manner, I realized it is not a population that I am passionate about working with and for. There is little to no opportunity for prevention practices, just intervention. Learning this about myself was really useful and would not have been possible prior to my rotation in that department.

Though I still am not certain what path I want to take in my medical career, many doctors tell me it’s important to try a little bit of everything in order to ascertain what I don’t want. I now know that I do not want to do anything related to the heart or brain and I most likely want to go into pediatrics or something that works with younger populations, which I will get to experience next rotation in the Mother Baby Care Unit. I am very excited to have the opportunity to work with the polar opposite population from my department this summer and experience the miracle of birth while working with new mothers and their infants.

I would strongly recommend this internship to any who are interested in healthcare because it truly gives its interns more experience than any other program I’ve heard of. I would advise any intern who decides to apply for the Clinical Care Extender internship through Cope Health Solutions to do project hours in order to get an assignment of their choosing. I would also advise them to think carefully about what they think they do and don’t want to do in a clinical setting as a healthcare professional, but then to leave their preconceived notions at the door.

I would not have been able to have this experience of learning what I do and don’t want in terms of both specialization and role in the hospital without the internship grant. I am incredibly grateful to have been given the opportunity to work in a hospital and gain experience in healthcare.

Whether you’re a penniless student, a starving artist, an unpaid intern, or any other person who has the dream but not the means, you need an individual grant.  As an undergrad with little of my own money, I’ve learned about the process from the inside.  Here are some of the basics:

1. Finding Funders

Finding a funder is half the job, but unfortunately it’s also the most tedious half. The Foundation Center has a lot of resources to help you get started.  Michigan State University has a “database of databases” for grants, although I personally find it a bit overwhelming.  Especially when you’re just beginning.  Still, it’s a broad enough resource to potentially apply to anyone.  You can find more specific sites and databases depending on what you’re planning to do—be it scientific research or attending a conference or doing an extended art project.  You could also look into the National Science Foundation or the New York Foundation for the Arts.  If you’re a student, your college also likely has funding from its official resources as well as student organizations.

During your search, you will experience frustration. I 1000% guarantee it.  Several funds will look so hopeful and so you, until you read the tagline at the bottom that says: For residents in Allenhurst, New Jersey only.  Who even lives there anyway?  You’ll wade through so many profiles until your eyes droop, but keep pressing until you have found at least two or three potential funders.  You might need more than one funder just for a single project.  Besides, backups are always a smart option.

2. Project Proposal

So, what does a proposal look like? It depends on the funder.  They might have a specific set of questions laid out for you to answer.  You might have to write a free-form proposal.  However the application looks, I found specificity to be the most useful tip.  What does your project look, feel, or taste like?  Imagine yourself doing your project—interviewing homeless veterans, creating a sculpture of recycled tires, researching fish brains at a university lab.  Think of all the details you have to take care of to make that happen.  What supplies do you need?  What are the costs?  Who will you work with and how?  It’s impossible to be too specific.

3. Personal Statement

The previous tip applies to personal statements, too, should you need to write one. This is not a dry academic paper for your English class.  This is an expression of you and why you are the ideal person to do your project.  Tell the funder stories that could only come from you.  Plenty of people have gotten gold medals in school or lost a soccer game or received a bad grade.  But who else learned Japanese by listening to music on the bus, or started a book club that combines comics and fantasy novels?  What are your particular interests?  Who are you as a person?  I hope you don’t fall into an identity crisis in trying to answer these questions, but they are important to consider.  You are a human being, not just a piece of paper.  Remind yourself and remind the people who are reading your proposal of that truth.

4. The Budget

You need to integrate the total costs of your project in your proposal if you don’t have a separate page for your budget. How much money are you asking for?  The maximum award?  Less than that?  Break down the grant into categories and subcategories, naming the price for things such as conference registration fee, travel, or supplies.  Show the funder that you know what you’re doing and you have the ability to actually carry out this project.  Remember the golden rule: specificity.

If you ever feel exhausted or impatient with this whole process, remember your goal is not getting money. It’s what you want to do with that money.  If you want to make your project happen (and I assume you do), let that show through in your application.  You already have the passion, so make it your strength and take the plunge!

Bridgette Ramirez

The first day on the job, I headed for home… and my work came with me. My brother pulled up in the Willamette University parking lot to find me sitting on the concrete, my backpack at my side, and a vase of purple flowers nested between my feet. I was in charge, along with the four other members on my field team, of flower-sitting.  We each brought home a vase of camas flowers, plucked from southern Oregon the week before, over which we had agreed to watch carefully. That night, every hour on the hour, I recorded the number of new flowers on each stem that had opened and how many had closed, tying colorful string to closed flowers, hoping they would all close early so I could go to sleep before midnight.

My summer research internship continued along in this manner as we worked diligently anywhere from 5 to 9 to 13 hour days. This is how field season works, when researchers live at the beck and call of the organisms they so dutifully observe and manipulate in order to collect data they may analyze during the remainder of the year. Of course, for me, field season was my life for only nine weeks. But while the internship lasted, we worked as a unit – professor, post-doc, and three students – and tackled our research goals in concrete ways.

Marked by peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, rented vehicles, meter sticks, and mosquitoes, days in the field consisted of driving followed by collection. We all performed similar duties, collecting data on the morphological, genetic, ecological, emergence, and reproductive distinctions between the species and subspecies of the camas flower, native to my home in the northwest. After driving anywhere from twenty minutes to eight hours to get to the sites, I would  either help measure features of the camas flowers at random in a population, collect leaves for genetic analysis, gather stems of fruits and seeds for restoration work, catch pollinators, or perform crosses by hand between species. When doing this work, I wore the clothing we jokingly called our “field line”: zip-off hiking pants, graphic tees, bandanas, thick wool socks, and hiking boots or rain boots.

Barbara Kingsolver, in her essay “The Forest in the Seeds” from her book High Tide in Tuscon, describes her work as an ecology graduate student watching lizards sitting in the sun doing almost nothing. After detailing the boredom of the work, she remarks that at least her “subjects had heartbeats, and pity my botanically inclined colleagues who were counting pollen grains under a microscope, or literally watching the grass grow.” The latter was my summer experience, and yet it was not so deadening as Kingsolver’s description makes it sound. My research internship this summer was enjoyable and satisfying, full of enthusiasm, and more than a bit of quiet observation. It was one of the best summers I have had, and I cannot be anything other than grateful that I was able to have this opportunity.

I would like to end by thanking Barbara Bice, whose generous Internship Grant in Public Interest supported my research this summer and allowed me to pursue my biology interests. In addition, many thanks to CP&R for facilitating these grants, allowing so many Scripps College students to participate in internships they otherwise might not be able to. I only hope these opportunities continue to expand so that all Scripps students that wish to can benefit from them. I had a wonderful summer and am ready to go enjoy another rewarding year at Scripps!

My internship with the Sierra Club this summer advanced many of my professional, personal, and intellectual goals, and in the most incredibly dynamic and fulfilling way possible. I learned about a profession that interests me, I cultivated skills and knowledge relevant to the work I hope to do in the future, and I was able to work with issues I care about alongside a group of equally passionate individuals who are actually working in the thick of things to enact change and make progress. I did not realize just how plugged into international, national, statewide, and regional issues the Sierra Club (through its extensive network and coalition partnerships) really is, and I had the privilege of working intimately on campaigns and with people at each of these levels. Weaving through the many different programs (from ones that focus on coal to international trade agreements to land use to super PAC candidate endorsements) is, I noticed, an overarching consciousness that reminded me of the mission at the heart of the Sierra Club that John Muir founded in 1892.

Working with the media team helped me to develop a skillset and understanding of issues and practice inherent in the worlds of environmental policy and nonprofit communications. I learned about how to cooperate with an internal team of communicators to coordinate myriad efforts and maintain consistency in messaging. I learned how to conduct media outreach, pitch stories to reporters via email and phone calls, and gauge interest in potential stories. I learned about how to monitor certain policy issues, election races, and hits in the news. I practiced building press lists and doing demographic, political, and location-based research. In addition to this, I practiced and enhanced different kinds of writing than the typical academic and journalistic writing I am accustomed to – I worked on blog writing, op-ed writing, and even prescriptive (and, in some cases, critical) writing targeting certain issues, opponents, etc. This holistic approach reminded me of my liberal arts education and gave me the chance to see how such an influential nonprofit organization can operate so successfully and cohesively.

I was most surprised that my supervisors entrusted me with such high-profile work. They gave me a project that I saw through beginning to end, involving a new wind energy advertisement initiative launched by the Sierra Club; my chief supervisor, the National Press Secretary for the Club, had me research key media outlets in certain districts where the ads would be launched; I then put together a reporter/press contact list, drafted a talking points memo based on the new campaign, then actually called the reporters and pitched the story about the initiative directly. It was so fulfilling to correspond with reporters to see some articles written in response to my pitch.

After a few test-runs, they gave me big blog pieces to write about endorsed candidates, trusted me to research daily updates on key midterm election races and send reports to the whole political/lobbying/media team, ghostwrite first drafts of articles for campaign directors and chapter leaders, and interact with Sierra Club press secretaries across the country. They sent me to EPA hearings to provide live updates and photos, to hear the President speak when the Sierra Club was invited to one of his speeches, and to various events around Washington. They always wanted to be sure that I was having the experience and doing the work I wanted to do – they assured this in weekly check-ins. The most fulfilling (and unexpected) moment came during my exit interview, when my supervisors told me that I was going to be missed and that my work really assisted them this summer.

I had the best summer of my life in DC, and leaving in August was incredibly difficult – I almost wanted to start my professional life immediately! My advice to any Sierra Club media intern is to go for everything wholeheartedly; this internship was a dream come true for me, in that in gave me exposure to and real-world applicable skills for a field that interests me, allowed me to work on issues I’m passionate about, and helped me to begin forming an incredible network in a city and industry I can see myself entering post-college. Every intern should jump at the chance to work on any projects that the media team offers, propose new ideas he/she is interested in, constantly ask for feedback, and propose assisting in any capacity needed – simply providing support to various members of the media team proved to be incredibly enriching and eye-opening to the realities of work in this sector. Be open, be engaged, be inquisitive, be thorough, and do not be afraid to be passionate! Giving 110% every day may be exhausting, but I believe doing so paid major dividends, and I would do it all over again if given the chance.

Hard work is a quality that has been ingrained in me since I was very young. Being raised by a single mother, I always admired the late hours she spent at the office, knowing that she was working so I could get a great education. At the boarding school I attended, Northfield Mount Hermon, every student had a required 20 hours of work job every week. Working on the farm, in the dining hall, and as a tour guide helped me realize that I relish opportunities where I am depended upon; to be responsible for a job getting done didn’t feel like pressure, it felt rewarding. Since I was 15 I worked in the community every summer, from Stop & Shop to Tedesco Country Club. This summer, I interned for the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus (MWPC). MWPC is a non-profit, nonpartisan organization that encourages women to be politically active. Since its foundation in 1971, the core mission of MWPC has been to increase the number of women elected to office. I worked mainly in the sphere of their MWPC Political Action Committee (PAC) because many elections are going on this year. The MWPC PAC supports qualified women who are pro-choice and pro-equal-pay in local or statewide races. Some weeks I would assist MWPC’s Young Professional events, which attract many young, politically engaged women in Boston. Though I would work these events, usually at the registration desk, I did not miss anything going on! Seeing young women gathering for a book release, rally, or speaker, talking about their professional goals and their weekend plans, made me feel like I was getting a glimpse of my future.

Though the MWPC events were crash courses in presentation, communication, and networking, I learned even more key skills working in the office. Throughout May and June, MWPC’s two full-time employees needed information on every woman candidate in Massachusetts for the upcoming November elections in order to choose whom to endorse. From State Senate to Treasurer, State Auditor to Governor, all races in Massachusetts needed to be thoroughly researched. So for the first two months I learned how to follow MWPC’s research guidelines, by being concise yet detailed, in order to write 4-5 pages of research on numerous women candidates. Reading about where candidates stood on these issues and why helped shape my own views on these political issues. Overall, campaign research was the most challenging, but most fruitful task at MWPC internship.

I learned so much from my MWPC internship: how to write a press release, research candidates, write compelling blog posts about women’s issues, work with others to find quick solutions, delegate and divide work, be diligent and precise with data entry, and throughout work be personable and reasonable. But the curiosity and excitement I felt hearing Massachusetts’ leaders explain vital legislative reform that needed to be done taught me even more about myself, and what I want for my future.