Tag Archives: internship grant

How an Unexpected Turn Can Lead to New Discoveries

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My summer internship experience definitely did not go as I had initially planned.  I started my summer off by working for the American Association of Singapore (AAS)—a non-profit based in Singapore which helps expatriates adjust to Singapore through attending events, networking nights, and through the organizations career resource center. I was asked to be the assistant for the events manager for the organization’s biggest event of the year: Independence Day Celebration. This event is hands down the most attended American Independence Day celebration in all of Singapore and therefore assisting the events manager was quite a demanding job.  After all the meticulous planning and preparing, it was a true spectacle to see the event finally come to life.  Along with the other Scripps College intern, I wrote the front-page article for AAS’ publication on Independence Day, which was showcased in their August issue.  Along with the Independence Day article, I also wrote an article on Singapore’s nightlife in the “Newcomers Guide” section of the September issue of the Singapore American News Paper.

After working at AAS, I had planned to go to New Delhi and work with a very well-known NGO. Unfortunately things didn’t go as planned and I decided to return to Singapore as I had applied for an internship with the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) and successfully gotten it. AmCham Singapore is the largest foreign business chamber in Singapore. I think my internship with AmCham has been ridiculously productive, challenging, and enriching. I can confidently say that sitting in an office from 8:00am-6:00pm has taught me how to work smart, prioritize, focus, and be patient. Although I have learned a lot through the work I have done, I have also learned a lot by attending a lot of the business events AmCham hosts— “Tackling Infrastructure for a Future Jakarta,” “Women in Leadership: Driving Economic Growth Through Women’s Empowerment,” “The Economist Intelligence Unit: Global and ASEAN Economic Forecast,” just to name a few. These events have given me a wealth of knowledge about economics, women in the corporate world, and the region I currently live in and that is something that I will especially take away from my time with AmCham.

Although things did not work out the way I had expected with my summer, I can still proudly say that my internship experiences have been nothing short of remarkable and I couldn’t have asked for a more valuable experience before I head off to my study abroad in three weeks’ time to the London School of Economics. Hopefully there are many more adventures, planned and unplanned, in the future because after this experience, I’m ready to embrace them all!

Communicating Art

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This summer I was the curatorial and development intern at LACE, a non-profit arts organization. With support from the Barbara Bice Internship in Public Interest, I lived in an apartment in downtown LA and worked four to five days a week, each day taking the train to Hollywood where I would emerge from underground to a bustling area with tall buildings. Its location gave LACE an edge and a lively energy.

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From day one, LACE became the highlight of my day. I’d take the back entrance, go up a steep flight of stairs, and enter the office. After a few weeks, LACE began to feel like a family.

In my first project at LACE I was assigned to be a week-long assistant to Jeanne Van Heeswijk, a prominent Dutch artist. Her project, Public Faculty No. 8 involved interviewing the public about Hollywood. This was completely new to me; as an artist, I had only worked with tangible mediums such as paint and pencil. To wander with Jeanne and ask passersby their thoughts was initially difficult for me to accept as art. Yet as we collected information I began to see an art project. There was a melancholic beauty in it; for example, on the same day we interviewed a famous hip-hop producer and a homeless man with cancer, creating a more rounded discourse about Hollywood. This project exposed me to the infinite possibilities of art, and showed me how different viewpoints can help create an accurate, complex painting of a subject.

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Soon, LACE began to prepare for “Native Strategies,” a group of performance artists set to create an art journal about communication through experimental sound composed of interviews and performances by LA-based artists. In preparation, the interns learned art handling, gallery preparation techniques, and how to use different tools. As the development intern, I was also responsible for donor and sponsor outreach.

After countless meetings with the artists, we cleaned the gallery, repainted walls, set up lighting and camera equipment, and put vinyl on the wall. I was even invited to edit interview transcripts that would eventually be published in the journal because I was an English major. Very exciting! LACE was ready for its summer show. Two completely different artists would perform together behind a screen which separated performers from audience.

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Although the audience could see through the screen, the performers could not, giving the illusion of a private space where they could communicate through their sound of choice. After each performance, the artists would engage in a conversation about the performance and their thoughts on sound and communication. It was very beautiful to watch, especially knowing that my efforts had gone into this project. Listening to the audio of their interviews afterwards while editing the transcriptions made it more rewarding.

I was given a well-rounded experience at LACE thanks to my extremely helpful and encouraging boss Melissa, who has given me knowledge that can be used in any future job in the art world. Not only did I learn about the inner workings of a very successful non-profit art organization, I also learned how to work with all kinds of people and collaborate on projects. Working with people who were involved with the arts really helped me understand myself more in terms of my relationship to art, the art world, and the people involved within it, and I am so thankful that I had the chance to have this experience.

Editor’s Note: This guest blogger was a 2014 Scripps College Internship Grant recipient. To learn more about the 2015 Internship Grant process, click here.  Deadline Feb. 5.

Why I’m Excited for Law School

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Law school is no longer a distant eventuality, but a concrete and enthralling step in my future.  Before this internship I had my 10-year plan: graduate Scripps College with a Bachelor of Arts in American Studies, secure and complete a foreign Fellowship like the Fulbright or Watson, work at a meditation center in upstate New York for a year, and then go to law school.  After my internship, I still have the exact same plan, but where it was diaphanous before it’s become real.  I am excited for law school!

Grace Dahlstrom

Photo of myself and other Legal Interns in front of the Duval Country Courthouse.

As interns, we were pampered with government badges and weekly field trips to different sectors important to prosecutors, both public and private.  The best perk was where government badges could take us – inside private rooms to observe and aid prosecutors as they decided which jurors to strike or advocate for in upcoming trials, inside a judge’s chambers in first appearance court, to exclusive Barr events, and, most exciting of all, inside court rooms.  While getting access inside a courtroom isn’t an elitist or hard-achieved feat what I saw inside the courtroom changed my life.  I loved it.  I was completely enthralled.  And now I am completely enthralled in the prospect of law school and even the typically arduous process of preparing for law school.  Whereas before studying was a necessary drudgery, I now have the vision of law school burning bright before me as a beacon to inspire me to study harder, strive for excellence, and push me through those windowless late night library sessions.

Three weeks into the internship, and the day after showing initiative on an intern-wide project, my boss called me into her office for a closed-door chat.  After asking about my plans for the future, she inquired if I wanted to work as a prosecutor, and more specifically, if I wanted to work as a prosecutor in Jacksonville.  After a 45-minute chat, I gleefully left the office and immediately text my parents that my boss had just insinuated giving me a job in the future after law school. Two weeks before exiting the internship, I interviewed my boss for a project I was doing for a summer leadership conference I was attending, Collegiate Leadership Jacksonville, and she confirmed my hunch by telling me, “You know why I was asking about your future plans, right?  It’s because I’d like to have you intern with us here again and come back to us after law school. I keep my eye out for motivated, mature students like you.”

This summer certainly ignited my motivated and mature side.  I was in the courtroom for the sentencing hearing of a mother who pled guilty to charges of overdosing and killing her four-year-old son.  I met a man in county jail who was about to serve a 14-year imprisonment simply for having a gun.  I observed court clerks mock a mentally challenged woman in first appearance court.  I rode along with a police officer and went with him on call to three different sexual assault crimes and one case of trespassing.  I filled arrest warrant files.  I accidentally made over 100 copies of a document I was attempting to fax.  Every day I learned something new, whether about the law, or a previously existent but undefined part of myself.  It has been an absolute blessing and honor to attend Scripps College and be a part of programs such as this.

Editor’s Note: This guest blogger was a 2014 Scripps College Internship Grant recipient. To learn more about the 2015 Internship Grant process, click here.  Deadline Feb. 5.

Using my Passion in my Summer Internship

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My internship this summer at Building Changes, an affordable housing nonprofit organization, was such an interesting experience. My role in the organization for three months was to learn about and develop an evaluation tool for one of the local programs that Building Changes had funded for three years through two grants—the Family Self-Sufficiency Program at a local public housing authority. Although Building Changes had funded the project, the organization only knew the desired outcome of the program, and not its actual components or the theory behind the program.

One of my tasks was to figure out how the program worked and relay this to my supervisors at Building Changes before developing a way to analyze the program’s success, which would give the program a better chance at receiving future funding and supply information for Building Changes and Building Changes’ donors (most of their grant funding comes from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and federal sources) about the success of the funding that they provide.

To evaluate the program, I identified the main areas of the program: goal fulfillment, income progression, receipt of public assistance, and program graduation. Using data from the program’s files, I compiled a database of income information, public assistance amounts, goal fulfillment, and graduation rates and developed a series of reports that can be easily run again in the future. Using data reporting software, I compiled a preliminary report on whether or not the Family Self-Sufficiency Program (FSS) program was on track to fulfill its goals and worked with FSS program staff to perfect the data evaluation program and draw concrete conclusions about the program’s success thus far. It was a very steep learning curve to get used to the data software (Crystal Reports and YARDI) that the agency used, especially since they were new to most of the staff there as well, but it was an exciting challenge to figure out how to apply my statistical skills gained in my coursework at Scripps to new kinds of data in a completely different setting.

Although Building Changes and the public housing agency will have to wait another year for new data to be collected and compared to measure progress of the program, the FSS program seems to be on track with other FSS programs in similarly-sized cities. In addition, the housing agency that I worked closely with has shared the data analysis reports that I developed to other agencies with FSS programs that use the same software. Those agencies can use the reports I developed to do similar data analysis, even if the goals for their particular program differ slightly, the reports provide information on all aspects of the program and use the data that all public housing agencies are collect annually.

The work I did this summer felt so intellectually exhausting at the time, but it was so exciting to see the work I did come together at the end of the summer. Although I didn’t get a feel for what the day-to-day work of an actual data analyst does because the project I did was so specific, I learned so much about program evaluation and gained useful skills for future work with data. I love working with data and this summer was such a reassurance that I will have career opportunities to use that passion in ways that deeply impact people.

Editor’s Note: This guest blogger was a 2014 Scripps College Internship Grant recipient. To learn more about the 2015 Internship Grant process, click here.  Deadline Feb. 5.

New Home, New Skills

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The sound of a hair dryer wakes me up at 5:30am as my roommate gets ready for her commute. On most mornings I try to get in a quick run on the treadmill. After my run I whip up a protein shake, stick it in the freezer, take a quick shower, and start getting ready for work. My business casual attire rotates with the least wrinkly shirt and dress pants (I have not quite figured out how to get that perfect crease with the iron). After I get dressed I sit down to eat my protein shake, put on my business heels, and head down to the bus stop at about 7:06 am. After transferring busses, hearing two law students discuss their latest test score, a young mother drop her daughter off at daycare, and witness a homeless man try and sneak on the bus, I finally reach The Borgen Project headquarters around 7:37 am.

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As the fundraising and development intern I research similar organizations, study their corporate sponsors, and compile a list of prospective businesses. The best way to gain support is to network, develop personal connections, ask people for advice before asking for a donation, and establish credibility. With this in mind the fundraising team yearned to create a public event that drew attention to our organization, involved a raffle or auction, and directly interacted with the community.

After cold calls and our daily 10:30 am intern meeting I would head out to Pioneer Square, grab a quick lunch, come back to the office and start working on the fundraiser. We began with logistics, securing a venue, catering, and outreach. Many afternoons I would contact local businesses asking for sponsorships and donated auction items.  After mornings of cold calls and afternoons of event planning, I caught a bus to Capitol Hill for basketball training.

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Playing basketball for CMS has been something I am so blessed to do and working hard in the off season is something I am extremely committed to. After workouts at the gym, three times a week I was fortunate to play pick-up games with the women’s team at Seattle University, just 10 minutes away from the apartment I was staying.

I gained valuable skills at The Borgen Project and was forced to become more independent. I admit I thought it would be easier than it was, but with coworkers and friends I felt at home in Seattle. I became immersed in a new liberal, forward thinking community while living in the heart of the city. I met new eclectic people, became comfortable in business meetings, and developed essential communication skills while learning the ins and outs of nonprofit organizations.

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Editor’s Note: This guest blogger was a 2014 Scripps College Internship Grant recipient. To learn more about the 2015 Internship Grant process, click here.  Deadline Feb. 5.