The Intern Diaries: Introduction

My first week of double-interning is over. I am working with the Erie Community Foundation and Housing and Neighborhood Development Service for the next couple months. I am excited to be a part of both these wonderful organizations, and I will actually be blogging for ECF! So, I commission you to go forth and read it.

I came up with the clever title of Intern Diaries just before searching Google to see if I was really that original. Fail. Many interns before me have tagged their experiences identically, but I shall nonetheless stick by it.

I wanted to bullet some of my very interny, inelegant moments from the first week. So, here they are, for your reading and scoffing pleasure:

• Upon arriving at my first professional event sponsored in part by ECF, I sat in the Ambassador Center parking lot and watched very sleek business men and women enter through the doors. Dubbed a “Poverty Simulation” aimed at opening community members’ eyes to low income residents’ day to day toils, the event attracted potential donors, i.e. people with money. I, in my Tommy Hilfiger zip-up, jeans, and flip flops, thus panicked. I couldn’t be late; that would reflect poorly. But I couldn’t go in like this. So, I opened the trunk, still very unpacked from college, found two very wrinkled pieces of clothing—a black cardigan and simple white v-neck—and employed my large bottle of Dollar General wrinkle release in a hasty manner. Stretching the wrinkles out of the cardigan against my steering wheel, I managed to straighten up a little before going in. “Nice save!” texted mother. The flip-flops were still rather shoddy though.

• On HANDS day 1, I managed to pour myself the last cup’s worth of coffee from the communal coffee pot, and the CEO came around the corner at this exact moment. I was with my supervisor, and she was scrambling to make/show me how to make a new pot. “It’s his number 1 pet peeve when the coffee is out.”

• On official day 2 at ECF, I battled with a monster of a copy machine. With four trays and randomized, alternating tray features, the machine outclassed me. I had to do double-siding printing, which meant my re-inserting papers in the correct direction in one of four trays. After many wasted pages, I finally figured out I could select which tray to print from. But even when I did this, the machine turned on me and produced more waste. I ended up with a 3-inch stack—not an exaggeration—of wasted pages, which I hid in my bottom desk drawer and will take home in inconspicuous segments over the next 2 months.

• “What would you like to pursue after you get your degree?” asked my supervisor at HANDS. “Well, I’m not quite sure; that’s why I want to learn about this kind of work.” I told her about my studies in urban anthropology, social policy, and such, and went on to say, “I’m really interested in public housing work.” Calmly, she responded, “Well, we are a private housing organization…” Flustered I replied, “Well, yah, right, yah...”

• Deciding to exit most professionally and gracefully from ECF on copy machine-nightmare day, I turned my head to direct a goodbye to the president sitting in his office. In doing so, I managed to crash my right foot into another staff member’s desk, and draw much attention to my intern existence. “Oh, I’m running into things,” I said in poor attempts at humiliation remedy. The Programs Director was also watching, lips pinched, from her office.