Okay, okay, "soon-ish" can be interpreted relatively loosely, but it's still been a pretty ridiculously long time since I've written. To be fair, my computer, which has always been somewhat passive aggressive, and prone to crapping out at the worst possible times, has stubbornly refused to turn on since about the last time that I've written-which has been almost a month. After multiple shipments from back home (a new battery, a new adapter), we know, by the process of elimination, that the problem is "internal," a scary word which conjures up thoughts of several hundred dollar repair bills, and potentially weeks of waiting. :( But the only other option that I have is to buy a new laptop (just after buying a new camera, and covering what this summer will cost me-although, luckily, study abroad grants will pay for most of it), so I still haven't decided what to do - but I have to do something.
What's been going on the past month? Well, needless to say, I've been settling into a routine, while having new experiences at the same time. My roommates and I have been tourist-ing it up on the weekends, and have so far seen: ONE of the Smithsonians (the Natural History museum), the shops and restaurants in Old Alexandria (which is a very cute 'genteel' district within walking distance of our apartment), dinner and a movie (the Sex and the City movie, no less) at Union Station, and the campus of Georgetown University (which is surrounded by the shopping district of Georgetown, including a two-store stationary store that I am officially in love with!). It has also been unbelievably,ridiculously hot lately (hello, cool 100 in the shade-see? I'm learning Fahrenheit!), so we've also spent a lot of time inside, just hanging out.
I've also been taking advantage of the academic and professional opportunities (there's a few-I guess this is the 'capital' or something). The Washington Center's been pretty helpful in this respect. Not only do they have you put together a 'portfolio' for the summer, which includes things like an updated resume, bi-monthly journal entries, a statement of academic, professional, civic and personal goals for the summer, an essay about your 'civic engagement project,' an 'internship defense letter' to your home university...yeah, you get the picture. It's annoying to have projects to complete on top of deadlines for work, and assignments for class, but I think that some of the assignments really contribute to making this experience a worthwhile one, particularly in the professional sense.
It's not all drudgery, though: the Washington Center facilitates a lecture series that all interns attend on Monday afternoons. So far, the International Affairs program has heard from the heads of nonprofits, a former foreign service officer and ambassador, and a gentleman who founded a peace movement in Darfur. My Washington Center advisor also sends out daily email updates about all of the other events (panel discussions, lectures, dinners, conferences) that are on offer in DC, some designed specifically for the enormous intern population here. So far, I've attended a graduate school reception hosted by some of my top grad schools (including Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and Georgetown), where there actually was wine and cheese (all of the grad school fairs in Canada, take note!), and a panel discussion on the south Sudan peace agreement hosted by the Brookings institute. Next week, there's a Harvard admissions session, followed by a conference on the 8th where I'm hearing Ryan Gosling and Senator John Edwards. I know, I know - but someone has to do it. :)
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Sunday, June 1, 2008
The View from the Top (of My Roof)
SO I DON'T THINK I need to say how cool this is. I'm on my own with four really cool roommates, in an amazing, beautiful city, with a phenomenal job (albeit, one I don't get paid for). Yes, there's a lot of extra stuff that you get (and that you therefore get to do) when you do this through the Washington Center: an academic course and all the coursework that goes with it, the Presidential speaker series, research papers both for your class and for the center, a professional interview, and a massive portfolio including bi-monthly 'journal entries.' But I'm not getting freaked out about deadlines-yet-so for the moment, things are good.
I'm in "the Meridian at Braddock Place," which is a new-ish apartment complex with the Braddock road metro station literally in its backyard (it takes me less than 2 minutes to walk from my front door to the entrance of the station). The metro is like my apartment: clean, comfortable, and reasonably quiet (at least compared to the NYC subway). My love of urban living has only been intensified lately - lots of parks, lots of fountains, lots of little cafes, shops and bistros, easy metro access, easy walking distances, lots of everything good. This is particularly true of the area in which I work - Dupont Circle - which is basically a couple of square blocks of loveliness, with 26 amazing restaurants (including two sushi bars, an Indian restaurant, a Thai place, a Potbelly Sandwich Works, a Starbucks, three bistros, two independent bookstores, and a park within sight of my office building. The building in question is super-nice and has a pharmacy at the bottom (open 24 hours, and stocking everything imaginable) and a patio on the roof with am amazing view of the city, and cute wrought-iron tables where you can eat your lunch (I am actually together enough to buy tupperware containers, but not enough to buy salad stuff, so I suspect I will have to buy my lunch for another day or so). So, the commute is about 30 metro minutes + a 10 minute walk down Connecticut (one of the nicest streets in town), versus an hour-plus commute to the middle of nowhere. The office is really nice, and so are the people (Lorelle, who initially interviewed me for the post, is also my supervisor). I'm the National Outreach Intern: essentially, I'll be doing work related to the different initiatives and coalitions that Women Thrive heads up. For example, I spent most of today working on making a summary chart recording the pledges that different members of the Women's Faith Development Alliance have made to women's equality and economic rights. When she interviewed me, Lorelle said that this was a "great opportunity to survey the DC-area NGO landscape," and now I see what she meant. I think I'll be doing lots of really cool stuff this summer, and learn a ton to boot. I'll keep you posted.
As previously mentioned, my roommates and I actually get along incredibly well - so well that we've not only gone grocery shopping (and other stocking up, Target-style) together, but also sightseeing: so far, we've hit up Union Station, parts of The Mall (we went to see the WWII and Jefferson Memorials in the dark on the weekend, which was phenomenal), and Chinatown (on Sunday-we actually ended up in an Irish pub eating Guinness ice cream and eating nachos like four college friends - pretty cool). There's a few other interns working at World Thrive, too (including some more that start on Monday) but I haven't gotten to know them very well. All four of us have different class schedules, and work at slightly different times, but it's really nice to come home after work knowing that people you actually like will be there. Plus, we've got a plan to hit one Smithsonian museum every weekend-finally, people who actually want to go to museums (sorry, Kiosh :P).
I've been having fun walking around and riding the metro by myself too, though. There's more new stuff to come, including my class on Thursday, and the beginning of the International Affairs lecture series (on Monday). I'm hoping things don't get too crazy, because I'd like to spend some time exploring the city (I bought a Frommer's Washington on the weekend!) and squeeze in a trip (or two) to NYC. For $35 round-trip, I would totally walk around for 36 hours with no hotel. You know I'd do it!
More crazy stuff will ensue this week. But I'll write again soon...ish.
;-)
I'm in "the Meridian at Braddock Place," which is a new-ish apartment complex with the Braddock road metro station literally in its backyard (it takes me less than 2 minutes to walk from my front door to the entrance of the station). The metro is like my apartment: clean, comfortable, and reasonably quiet (at least compared to the NYC subway). My love of urban living has only been intensified lately - lots of parks, lots of fountains, lots of little cafes, shops and bistros, easy metro access, easy walking distances, lots of everything good. This is particularly true of the area in which I work - Dupont Circle - which is basically a couple of square blocks of loveliness, with 26 amazing restaurants (including two sushi bars, an Indian restaurant, a Thai place, a Potbelly Sandwich Works, a Starbucks, three bistros, two independent bookstores, and a park within sight of my office building. The building in question is super-nice and has a pharmacy at the bottom (open 24 hours, and stocking everything imaginable) and a patio on the roof with am amazing view of the city, and cute wrought-iron tables where you can eat your lunch (I am actually together enough to buy tupperware containers, but not enough to buy salad stuff, so I suspect I will have to buy my lunch for another day or so). So, the commute is about 30 metro minutes + a 10 minute walk down Connecticut (one of the nicest streets in town), versus an hour-plus commute to the middle of nowhere. The office is really nice, and so are the people (Lorelle, who initially interviewed me for the post, is also my supervisor). I'm the National Outreach Intern: essentially, I'll be doing work related to the different initiatives and coalitions that Women Thrive heads up. For example, I spent most of today working on making a summary chart recording the pledges that different members of the Women's Faith Development Alliance have made to women's equality and economic rights. When she interviewed me, Lorelle said that this was a "great opportunity to survey the DC-area NGO landscape," and now I see what she meant. I think I'll be doing lots of really cool stuff this summer, and learn a ton to boot. I'll keep you posted.
As previously mentioned, my roommates and I actually get along incredibly well - so well that we've not only gone grocery shopping (and other stocking up, Target-style) together, but also sightseeing: so far, we've hit up Union Station, parts of The Mall (we went to see the WWII and Jefferson Memorials in the dark on the weekend, which was phenomenal), and Chinatown (on Sunday-we actually ended up in an Irish pub eating Guinness ice cream and eating nachos like four college friends - pretty cool). There's a few other interns working at World Thrive, too (including some more that start on Monday) but I haven't gotten to know them very well. All four of us have different class schedules, and work at slightly different times, but it's really nice to come home after work knowing that people you actually like will be there. Plus, we've got a plan to hit one Smithsonian museum every weekend-finally, people who actually want to go to museums (sorry, Kiosh :P).
I've been having fun walking around and riding the metro by myself too, though. There's more new stuff to come, including my class on Thursday, and the beginning of the International Affairs lecture series (on Monday). I'm hoping things don't get too crazy, because I'd like to spend some time exploring the city (I bought a Frommer's Washington on the weekend!) and squeeze in a trip (or two) to NYC. For $35 round-trip, I would totally walk around for 36 hours with no hotel. You know I'd do it!
More crazy stuff will ensue this week. But I'll write again soon...ish.
;-)
Friday, May 30, 2008
A Bit of a Runaround
PROOF POSITIVE that things here have a certain fluidity to them was established today, when I walked into the Washington Center today for the second day of orientation (more on the first later) at 1pm, and left at 3pm with a completely different internship.
How did I become such a renegade, you ask? Well, in order to come to DC, I had to get a J-1 visa (which is a new visa specifically designed for internship and training program participants coming into the US from Canada). In order to get a J-1 visa (in addition to filling out a pile of last-minute paperwork that kept me up most of Monday night, and spending an extra twenty-ish minutes biting my nails at customs) I had to have an official internship placement (and my supervisor had to sign my forms). So, I accepted the offer of the only organization that had gotten back to me by last Friday, International Action. And I was pretty happy about it, although I had applied and/or interviewed for a couple of other internships that were more substantial, more immediately related to my field of interest (international human rights law and policy) and with larger organizations that offered opportunities for more inter-organizational collaboration.
One of these was a placement with Women Thrive Worldwide (formerly the Women's Edge Coalition), which is a nonprofit representing a coalition of more than 50 different organizations that focus on the (mostly economic) rights of women internationally. In the words of their website (found at http://www.womensedge.org/), Women Thrive "develops, shapes, and advocates for policies that foster economic opportunity for women living in poverty. [They] focus on making U.S. international assistance and trade programs prioritize women," with the belief that the economic empowerment of women is the most direct route to combating world poverty.
The internship position that Women Thrive was offering sounded valuable, substantive, and exciting (more details when I actually begin work!), but I didn't get a callback before I had to respond to TWC with my confirmed placement, so I accepted another (one that was not as ideal, but still great) and figured that was that.
That was, that is, until things calmed down on Wednesday, and I finally got a chance to check my email inbox. Sometime while I was on the plane that morning, my interviewer at Women Thrive had emailed me: they wanted to offer me the internship! The problem was, I already had one. Very slight madness ensued.
I spent most of Thursday (and Friday) intermittently consulting with my advisor and calling my contact at Women Thrive. The upshot: by the end of today, it was established that my visa could be transferred, TWC would send other people over to International Action to interview for internship positions, and that, for all intensive purposes, I could officially accept Women Thrive's offer (which I did).
So, all's well that ends well. :) I think this new internship will be an amazing experience, and I'm very happy about seizing the opportunity to take it. It's been pretty slow going getting the information coordination going between TWC and Women Thrive (which will henceforth be known as WTW), but for all intensive purposes, I know where I'm working for the next two months, and I'm pumped!
Obviously, I've moved in to a new apartment, explored a new city (so cool-like NYC only scaled down both in terms of size, and dirtiness), and met new roommates. All of this equals many, many more paragraphs. But I think this entry's long enough - so I'll keep y'all* in suspense about everything else until later this weekend.
* See? I'm picking up the local dialect already! And yes, I'm in DC-but that particular expression seems to creep in to the language of a surprisingly large number of people here.
;-)
How did I become such a renegade, you ask? Well, in order to come to DC, I had to get a J-1 visa (which is a new visa specifically designed for internship and training program participants coming into the US from Canada). In order to get a J-1 visa (in addition to filling out a pile of last-minute paperwork that kept me up most of Monday night, and spending an extra twenty-ish minutes biting my nails at customs) I had to have an official internship placement (and my supervisor had to sign my forms). So, I accepted the offer of the only organization that had gotten back to me by last Friday, International Action. And I was pretty happy about it, although I had applied and/or interviewed for a couple of other internships that were more substantial, more immediately related to my field of interest (international human rights law and policy) and with larger organizations that offered opportunities for more inter-organizational collaboration.
One of these was a placement with Women Thrive Worldwide (formerly the Women's Edge Coalition), which is a nonprofit representing a coalition of more than 50 different organizations that focus on the (mostly economic) rights of women internationally. In the words of their website (found at http://www.womensedge.org/), Women Thrive "develops, shapes, and advocates for policies that foster economic opportunity for women living in poverty. [They] focus on making U.S. international assistance and trade programs prioritize women," with the belief that the economic empowerment of women is the most direct route to combating world poverty.
The internship position that Women Thrive was offering sounded valuable, substantive, and exciting (more details when I actually begin work!), but I didn't get a callback before I had to respond to TWC with my confirmed placement, so I accepted another (one that was not as ideal, but still great) and figured that was that.
That was, that is, until things calmed down on Wednesday, and I finally got a chance to check my email inbox. Sometime while I was on the plane that morning, my interviewer at Women Thrive had emailed me: they wanted to offer me the internship! The problem was, I already had one. Very slight madness ensued.
I spent most of Thursday (and Friday) intermittently consulting with my advisor and calling my contact at Women Thrive. The upshot: by the end of today, it was established that my visa could be transferred, TWC would send other people over to International Action to interview for internship positions, and that, for all intensive purposes, I could officially accept Women Thrive's offer (which I did).
So, all's well that ends well. :) I think this new internship will be an amazing experience, and I'm very happy about seizing the opportunity to take it. It's been pretty slow going getting the information coordination going between TWC and Women Thrive (which will henceforth be known as WTW), but for all intensive purposes, I know where I'm working for the next two months, and I'm pumped!
Obviously, I've moved in to a new apartment, explored a new city (so cool-like NYC only scaled down both in terms of size, and dirtiness), and met new roommates. All of this equals many, many more paragraphs. But I think this entry's long enough - so I'll keep y'all* in suspense about everything else until later this weekend.
* See? I'm picking up the local dialect already! And yes, I'm in DC-but that particular expression seems to creep in to the language of a surprisingly large number of people here.
;-)
Friday, May 23, 2008
An Abruptly-Ended Waiting Game
I'M VERY FAMILIAR with the admissions process. You send your favoured places piles of paper carrying your somehow-transcriped awesomeness. They review said piles of paper. You avoid looking at the phone/into the mailbox, bite your fingernails down to stubs, and then, roughly in proportion to how many piles of paper there are, how grumpy the admissions committee is, how the stars align, the degree of padding your resume boasts, and how much Murphy likes (or really doesn't like) you, the phone rings and/or the mailbox is filled.
What I didn't know is that some maverick activities and organizations refuse to conform to this universally accepted process. Yes, pursuits do exist whereby there are actually no freaking rules that govern the admissions process at all. Trying to get a summer internship in Washington, DC (which is the international capital of internships, leading to competition so intense that the city is also regarded, by a disgruntled minority, as the world capital of free, university-educated labour) falls into this category.
If you choose to do your internship through an organization like the Washington Center (http://www.twc.edu/), you don't just get an internship specifically tailored to your career goals. You also get to attend a bunch of private speaking engagements, and other activities, with TWC participants in your field. You get to take a related academic seminar taught by a naionally-recognized expert-often someone outside the academic community. And you make tons of amazing contacts.
But applying for an internship through an organization like TWC essentially means that there are TWO separate admissions processes that you, as an applicant, must contend with. I discovered that firsthand. Admission to TWC's International Affair's Program? Done a mere two weeks after I sent my application package to the University of Alberta's study abroad centre (I also got amazing financial assistance through scholarships this way, which is another reason why it gets my recommendation). I got an official acceptance letter, access to an online placement tracking system, the contact info of my advisor. Then, a whole lot of nothing.
What makes things so complicated is that TWC is standardized, while the internship placement process is not. At all. Period. Some internships start at the beginning of May, some at the beginning or even middle of June. Some of your most coveted institutions may only have internship programs for Masters or doctoral students, and you'll never even know this. As I discovered, some institutions contact you right away; others wait months. Some want an hour-long phone interview; others want a totally separate application package tailored to their needs; and still others (like my placement) just give your application and resume a close read, then call you up and offer you a job. It's a confusing process, to be sure. That means two things: that placing your affiliation in the hands of people who are paid to find you a job will give you peace of mind, and that it will likely make things a bit frusterating at the same time.
There are no regrets on this end, though. After a month of nail-biting, multiple interviews, cover letter rewrites, and more email correspondance than I'd care to admit, I'm on my way on Wednesay to an internship with International Action, an organization that's developing and implementing a chlorination system to provide clean drinking water in Haiti. I'll also be taking a course on civil and ethnic conflict while I'm in the capital, which is right up my alley, and definitely not offered at the U of A.
It's going to be a great summer. The hard part, though-getting my suitcase(s) packed in time to catch my 6am Wednesday flight-is yet to come.
;-)
What I didn't know is that some maverick activities and organizations refuse to conform to this universally accepted process. Yes, pursuits do exist whereby there are actually no freaking rules that govern the admissions process at all. Trying to get a summer internship in Washington, DC (which is the international capital of internships, leading to competition so intense that the city is also regarded, by a disgruntled minority, as the world capital of free, university-educated labour) falls into this category.
If you choose to do your internship through an organization like the Washington Center (http://www.twc.edu/), you don't just get an internship specifically tailored to your career goals. You also get to attend a bunch of private speaking engagements, and other activities, with TWC participants in your field. You get to take a related academic seminar taught by a naionally-recognized expert-often someone outside the academic community. And you make tons of amazing contacts.
But applying for an internship through an organization like TWC essentially means that there are TWO separate admissions processes that you, as an applicant, must contend with. I discovered that firsthand. Admission to TWC's International Affair's Program? Done a mere two weeks after I sent my application package to the University of Alberta's study abroad centre (I also got amazing financial assistance through scholarships this way, which is another reason why it gets my recommendation). I got an official acceptance letter, access to an online placement tracking system, the contact info of my advisor. Then, a whole lot of nothing.
What makes things so complicated is that TWC is standardized, while the internship placement process is not. At all. Period. Some internships start at the beginning of May, some at the beginning or even middle of June. Some of your most coveted institutions may only have internship programs for Masters or doctoral students, and you'll never even know this. As I discovered, some institutions contact you right away; others wait months. Some want an hour-long phone interview; others want a totally separate application package tailored to their needs; and still others (like my placement) just give your application and resume a close read, then call you up and offer you a job. It's a confusing process, to be sure. That means two things: that placing your affiliation in the hands of people who are paid to find you a job will give you peace of mind, and that it will likely make things a bit frusterating at the same time.
There are no regrets on this end, though. After a month of nail-biting, multiple interviews, cover letter rewrites, and more email correspondance than I'd care to admit, I'm on my way on Wednesay to an internship with International Action, an organization that's developing and implementing a chlorination system to provide clean drinking water in Haiti. I'll also be taking a course on civil and ethnic conflict while I'm in the capital, which is right up my alley, and definitely not offered at the U of A.
It's going to be a great summer. The hard part, though-getting my suitcase(s) packed in time to catch my 6am Wednesday flight-is yet to come.
;-)
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