Take the Good and the Bad

I haven't posted in awhile mostly because of time, mostly because of privacy (NGS owns anything I write on a computer and a few events happened that I didn't want NGS to 'own') and partly because it means writing about the end of my internship.

My recent big project was on the Albatross bird where NGS is doing a bolus dissection on-line so I spent a week or so researching the bird and marine debris. The poor things cannot distinguish the difference between trash and food and due to humans being humans all of the trash that winds up in the Pacific currents reach the Midway Atoll and the birds often die due to starvation, asphyxiation, and/or psychological trauma of not being able to regurgitate the food its body cannot process.

I also set up meetings with the photographers, wrote a photo shoot list, and am currently making sure 'everything' is ready for the big day (December 6).

At the meeting with the photographers I wanted to scream. I spent copious amounts of time making sure everything was set, researching how to write a photo shoot list, and trying to make everything as coherent as possible considering I have absolutely no background in photography.

When the meeting began one of my bosses lives in another state and we needed to conference call her in - that was a fight and a half because my other boss did not think it was necessary even though she is not the one creating the educational material on-line. With the help of another staff member I finally convinced everyone that the phone call needed to be made.

The next annoyance was creating a 'list' that was basically thrown out the window. The photographers basically wrote everything over from scratch even though if they had spent 2 minutes reading over my list we could have saved a half hour of everyones time.

Overall the meeting felt like a giant time waster and was probably the worst day I have had at work which in retrospect was not that bad of a day it is just frustrating when you are given 'special' jobs despite the fact that you are an intern but then your work is disregarded because you are an intern.

So I have decided to make a list, of the good and the bad because even though I am ready to move on and go back home/to Maine I think it is always good to go over what you've learned and how you've grown.

_______________________________

Pros:

Experience

The education work has helped guide me to further know what I do and do not want to do as a career (namely helping me realize I want to go into enviro. ed and NOT sit at a desk all day)

The free talks, movies, etc.

Meeting explorers and hearing their stories

Meeting the other interns and being surrounded by people who all have a similar academic interest as I do and find the world fascinating

Cons:

Name - I am so sick of having to pause any time I mention I intern with NGS - I usually don't say the name anymore unless I am asked because all the 'oh that's my dream job', 'you're so lucky', etc. gets tiresome after awhile.

Office setting

'You are the chosen one' attitude. Yes, I am one of ten, yes, I work extremely hard, yes, I have great professors that have helped me get here, no, it does not define who I am and I am certainly not a chose one.

One of the other interns has been told repeatedly that if she leaves NGS now without trying to get a contract is practically committing career suicide because no other name will be as good as NGS. That is absurd.

If you do not love your job and your heart is not in it, then it is not the job for you. I think that is a big flaw in our society. I plan on doing what I love because it makes me happy, not because there is a precious name attached.

I felt the same about choosing college. Is UMF well known for geography? No, it's known for education - has UMF given me opportunities because I reach out and try my hardest? Yes.

What have I learned most?

Names are not everything

What have I learned about myself?

I can live in a city and for the most part it has been a lot of fun/ I would recommend to anyone to branch out of their living comfort zones.

Great Migrations

National Geographic is branching out and hosting a whole new t.v. special called Great Migrations where this series follows different animals across the planet and film their migration battles.
I've been working a little bit on the education side of Great Migrations - mostly going through footage and determining whether or not it could be used for education.
From what I've been told it is like Planet Earth (I've never seen it) but better (obviously we're biased) not because of the footage but the story. Which, even though the opinion is biased its a compelling argument.
I do not know much (at all) about film, photography, etc., but from what I can tell everything is beautiful! Between watching the growth process of the monarch butterfly, a zebra stomping on a cheetah, or being utterly disgusted by the elephant seals matting rituals - everything is fascinating and I keep wishing for more clips to go through.
I could do without the death scenes, especially when babies are taken down, but it all just makes me want to go explore!
Actually, I have no desire to ever go to Africa...but I would really like to go to the Falkland Islands and Christmas Island, and see the monarchs semi-hibernate in Mexico.
It is pretty exciting being an Intern at NGS this fall - everything seems to be exciting and kicking off and brand new. The excitement helps keep my homesickness (or rather Mainesickness) at bay.
Even though I love being here, I'm ready for classes again...or at least to be off my butt for the majority of the day and not in front of a computer screen. It's crazy how some nights I just get sucked into sitting at my computer and watching t.v. after being in front of a screen all day.
I wonder if there is some kind of connection that could be made about the migrations our ancestors once made and the internal cues we listen to now. Programming based on what we need to survive...we don't need computers to survive but that's how a lot of our information is gained...tangent that I do not have a whole lot of time to ponder (at least not this second).

Great Migrations is great and airs Sunday November 7th at 8pm on the National Geographic Channel!

Body Language

This past week I went up to Philly to visit a gradschool to check out their Environmental Education program.
I took the train which was kind of exciting because other than the commuter rail into Boston I've never been on a 'big' train before and it was really nice.
Philly has a very impressive public transportation - not so impressive aesthetics to the city but I think I'm spoiled by how nice D.C. is... You can also use Google as a reliable commuting source and it tells you bus, train, and metro schedules and how to get from place to place which is something that D.C. does not have - if I had known about Wmata (D.C.'s public transportation website) I would have lived in a different place from Mt. Rainier because I was relaying on Google and where I ended up moving to takes me only 11 minutes to go to work on subway but on Google it was telling me it would have taken an hour and a half...but I'm getting off topic.
What I really want to discuss is body language and how we orient ourselves when talking to someone.

As I mentioned I went to visit a gradschool the other day - I got in earlier than expected (thank you Philly for being efficient) and explored around the campus for a little while.
The one thing that threw me off/was kind of neat was the feeling on being at a Castle. All buildings were stone and everything 'fit' together very nicely where Farmington has a hodgepodge of brick, asparagus sculpture, and stick frame houses that give it community character and you can tell that UMF is integrated into the town.
This school is a campus plopped in the middle of three major roads and has special entrances and it just does not have an integrated feel -and I would need a car. Although the public transportation is great up to the college there is a separate campus for science programs and I'm pretty sure I would need a car just to get around which is annoying because I sold mine.

Walking into the admissions building reminded me a lot of walking into Merril Hall with a giant staircase but when I went into the room and all of the chairs were set up in a speed dating kind of way. I do not really like describing it as that but I feel as though that is the best way to describe how the room was set up. There were professors on one side and when it was your turn you went and sat across from them.
I waited for a couple of minutes and began people watching trying to get a feel for the body language of the room. One professor was looking anywhere but in the eyes of the potential grad candidate, a couple were looking around the room and seemed completely uninterested, and a couple of professors had their hands to their chin with a couple of fingers placed on their face and slumping.
I walked over to one of the professors slumping, received a weak handshake and you could already tell that she was not interested in what I had to say.
I mentioned that I like alternative education and already have some experience working at a 4-H camp teaching environmental ed and gardening and she just shuffled papers, glancing over my transcript.
I was asked what I was doing down in D.C. and I said that I am interning in National Geographic's Education Department and her attitude completely changed. Suddenly she was sitting up, there was a smile on her face and she was making eye contact with me. Just dropping one name changed everything and changed how my interview went.
My transcript was actually looked at, we went over courses that I already have knocked off of the program (earth science classes, math, etc.) and she was genuine in how she treated me.
The interview ended with her telling me that I am a very driven and determined individual for someone so young and that she cannot wait to see my application.

It completely BAFFLES me that just because I am able to drop the name of National Geographic I am suddenly a worthy individual. And she hit the nail on the head - I am determined and I am driven and although sometimes I freak out about what I am going to do with my life, I do have goals and my attitude towards work and school are parts of my personality that I really appreciate.
The more time I spend at NGS the more I realize that this internship is truly a step in the door anywhere I go but it should not be the defining moment in my life that makes me a potential candidate for a job, acceptance into master's program, etc. It is my personality and attitude and work ethic that will help me move forward in my life.
Although it is probably not the school for me (I still need to do a little more research) going to that interview was not only a grounding experience but a learning one because now I know that maybe a small private school is not the option for me.

I guess the lesson learned is be careful of your body language because you never know who is going to walk through the door. I think if my experience had been a little different this school would still be high on my list. National Geographic is important to have on my resume but I had to be impressive to get here.

NW v. NE

Even though this week is a short week it has been pretty hectic - mostly because I moved last night to a safer part of town - I've had too many instances happen where I was previous living that this opportunity to move to a safer location came up and I knew I had to take it. Already I am a lot happier where I am living.
Which started me thinking about Town and Regional Planning last year and I how I thought things were changing in Inner cities and they are - poverty is just being pushed out instead of in.

For me to get to Mt. Rainier, MD (first stop outside of DC, NE) I would have to wait at least a half hour for a bus (because who can ever know when it is going to decide to show up), take the bus for a twenty minutes to get to the metro (that was 1.3 miles away but it was too risky to walk, even in the morning), take the metro to one stop, transfer and wait, take the metro twenty minutes into the city. All in all by the end of my stay in Mt. Rainier I was taking nearly 2hours out of my day (one way) to go 5 miles into the city and would be late for work.

To get home I would have to leave work early, commute and transfer on the metro and then run to the bus because if I did not make the 5:30 bus I would have to wait until 6:30 for the next one to go to my house all because I was too afraid to walk the 1.3 miles. Going home would take a little over an hour.

I should not have to be afraid but I was and now where I am living I only have to walk .5 miles to the metro through a nice section of town or walk .2miles to catch a bus and it all brings me to work in under a half hour and I am neither late nor need to leave early.
It baffles me that cities constantly say they are looking for ways to improve the system but the people in Mt. Rainier are angry. They are frustrated that they have to wait up to an hour sometimes to catch a bus home and that there isn't work near them. I was talking to one woman while waiting for the bus a couple weeks ago and I mentioned that I might try taking a bus from Ft. Totten (the stop before mine, NE) and she looked at me and said "Do not take a bus there, you will get raped".
Where I am living now (Friendship Heights, NW) is right near my friends at AU and a couple of work friends and the AU girls told me that the worst act of violence they've heard of in our neighborhood (in the past 3 years) is this man who will sometimes run around pinching a girl's butt.
It is ridiculous that because I am a white female who was previously living in a black community would constantly have to worry about being raped, mugged, chased, etc. but now that I am in a white community my biggest concern is a man who might try and pinch my butt.
Obviously I still have to be careful and keep my guard up because I am in a city but my risk has gone down significantly and all I had to do was move 7 miles West of Mt. Rainier.

It is also really frustrating that the predominantly white areas of DC have a bus stop at every corner while the black areas have one maybe every half mile and they are usually located in the 'better' parts of town.

Anacostia is said to be the worst neighborhood in DC (SE) and I was talking to someone from AU who mentioned that the first say of orientation he was brought on a tour of Anacostia where people yelled at the group constantly saying they needed to "go back where they came" and would be warned at intersections to not go down certain streets because they would not "come out the other side".

Anacostia from the 2000 Census was 92% African American (http://www.servinghistory.com/topics/Anacostia::sub::Demographics) - Mt. Rainier, African American and Hispanic are the predominant races (http://www.city-data.com/zips/20712.html) and in Friendship Heights 84% are white (http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/neighborhoods/guide/show/subarubia).

Anacostia Average Income: $28,934
Mt. Rainier: $46,913
Friendship Heights: $145,460
(All incomes gathered from city-data.com)

I did not realize the income level was jumping to nearly 100K...

I feel as though I could rant all day about inequalities and how neighborhoods and cities should not have that much disparity in only a few miles radius but it happens and we all know it happens but yet there does not seem to be much being done.
The one good thing I noticed in Mt. Rainier was this Co-Op called 'Glut' - organic and vegetarian everything and my grocery bill would often be under $40 dollars for a week - but I would have to walk quite a ways and by the end of my stay in Mt. Rainier once I got home I stayed home and did not venture past my bedroom.
Now I can leave at 5 o'clock on a Sunday and get my groceries and not have thoughts and concerns flooding my head about safety. Some of them will be there but not all.

I have to keep telling myself that I was not defeated by Mt. Rainier - our system is flawed and one person living in an area will not change the years and history of backlash of pushing poverty around to wherever is seen fit. My friend that helped move me last night is living in Georgia/Petworth which is still NW but on the edge of NE and has a few sketchy parts. She was even freaked out by the area I was living, especially hearing the sirens go off literally every 10 minutes.

My brain is flustered but hopefully living in a better area will at least ease one of the topics running through my mind.

Lots to Do

In the upcoming few weeks I am going to have a lot on my plate which is really exciting but kind of nerve wracking at the same time.

For Julie:
Finish up brainstorming lesson plan ideas
Organize lessons into a spreadsheet
Meet Thursday for a JulieSarah meeting to discuss the brainstorming
Meet Friday with Kim, Kathleen, and Julie to go over the brainstorming I've done - add in their input and get started on the contracting process

For Sarah W.:
Research the Oceans magazine and document/request permission for all of the pictures Sarah labeled.
Research MyshotYourShot to see if there are any additional photos we could use for an upcoming conference on the Ocean
Make sure the photos are copyrighted correctly and can be used
Have all of this done by 10/20

Today is the first day I've felt crunched for time with two projects going but I'm planning on managing my time - morning Julie, afternoon Sarah.
I might need to do a little more work for Julie this afternoon so that everything is ready for our meeting tomorrow.

It's kind of crazy that wish-list making starts next week for classes! I cannot seem to wrap my head around the fact that I'm a senior and will be graduating next Spring!

Best Project Ever

Brief background of what is going on right now in the Oceans Department of NGS:

Oracle gave us a grant for Ocean Education grades 9-12
We have a budget left over and are developing lesson plans for a 3-5 program
I've been going over standards and familiarizing myself with both National Standards for ELA, Math, Science, and Social Studies and Ocean Literacy Standards that NGS developed.
We have this extra budget to hire writers for the lessons

My new project:

• Brainstorm activities
  
• 3 Ideas per subject per literacy standard
• general ideas
• expand from ideas -> use mapping tools for ocean conveyor belt
• have the lesson ideas vary in difficultly -> based on 4th grade level
• Standard 1 (The Earth has one big ocean with many features)
• -> waves, currents, + ring of fire
  
• - waves will be easier to find activities compared to currents
• Standard 2 (ocean and life in ocean shape the Earth)
• -> erosion - is it a lab activity? calculations?
  
• - historic use of rivers + damning - pollution, un-natural drainage, pesticides, etc.
  
• Build a Frame Work for these activities
• Be CREATIVE - what would I have wanted to learn? What activities would be cool and exciting?

Julie and I will be brainstorming and having a meeting next Thursday to go over everything I find and help mold it better to then give to the writers

The better the materials and more information we can find the better the lessons will be developed

This project is going to be a lot of fun and I am really excited to start developing the frame work for some of the lessons that are going to be created!

Insert cliche title about everything happening for a reason...

Over the past week I've managed to get a lot accomplished, including meeting Julie for the first time and actually meet face to face to discuss my work at NGS.
Julie is a great boss to have - she is encouraging as well as gives me feedback on the documents I am creating for her and thinks I am a very efficient and hard worker which is really nice to hear as an intern.
I'm also trying to decide what to study in Gradschool and have changed my mind probably 10x in the past week on what I should do after I graduate this spring.
Should I become a teacher?
Would I want a planning masters?
Would 2 years in Teach for America be good for me?
Would I be happy as a planner?
Would I want just a edu masters?
My philosophy is that children shouldn't be taught to a test, would I be able to handle teaching that?
Teach for America would run during camp...can I handle not being at camp?
Is it silly not to apply to something because I could not teach at Tanglewood?
I am not entirely sure I want to be a planner.
I hate GRE's and what all standardized tests stand for...
Should I apply for jobs as an environmental ed teacher/alternative education?
Would I be able to get a master's in education and teach enviro. edu?
Oh look! There are programs that have environmental education as a degree!
Is it not required to have GRE's to apply to enviro ed programs...
Should I apply to Teach for America or just go on to get my degree?

Etc. etc. questions after question and scattered thoughts running through my head.
I think my brain has finally settled on teaching because nothing really makes me happier than watching and teaching children (thank you Tanglewood 4-H camp) and too many instances keep flashing in my face of:
A. you ended up at a teaching college and all of your friends are getting teaching degrees
B. you have always wanted to be a teacher
C. not only are you a camp counselor you teach enviro. ed. and already have some practice
D. there are 5 of you in the edu program at NGS but you're the only one that goes through lesson plans and is helping to create a curriculum for enviro ed

Those are just some of the things running through my head right now but the more I think about it the more I believe teaching is right for me and that environmental education would make me happy (and I really do not want a job that does not make me happy).

This week will consist of going through standards again and generalizing them so that we can apply them to lesson plans in combination with Ocean Literacy Standards.

I am overwhelmed.
By life. Not my internship.
My internship is wonderful and I am very thankful I have this opportunity.
I love this internship and it is helping me realize more and more where I want to go in life.
Am I repeating myself?

Why isn't there a portal that can take me to Farmington?
But that's what makes you stronger right? Figuring everything on your own and doing what feels right to you...

Again with the cliches.