Let’s be honest. The past ten weeks were filled with both great experiences and great challenges. I would like to believe I have risen to those challenges, savored those experiences and, beside that point, I feel that I have grown as a person over the course of this program. I have made many great friends (both at work and through Wayne State) who I will continue to get to know in the coming months and years, I have left my mark at my organization, and I am able to look back on my time here happily.
Reading this initial blog post, some of the things I wrote really bother me; the language I used is disrespectful to my organization and my coworkers, the post focuses on the negative aspects of what I had seen (although it includes positives), and I think it shows a lot that I naturally reacted most strongly to this, as opposed to the opportunities that my work offered me. However, I was also being very open with my thoughts (i.e. not having any filter on what I published for anyone to see) and really just trying to find my way after diving right into this new work environment.
From my position leaving this program, I can see all the good that happened throughout my time here. I think my coworkers would say that they are happy with the work I have done, but I feel that I now have some of the skills to do so much more in 10 weeks. My perceptions of the organization and the community are based in the experiences that I had there, albeit heavily influenced by my coworkers’ perspectives and stories. I have a much more nuanced knowledge of places I previously knew next to nothing about or that I had never heard of; I think these are the changed that I have experienced that I wasn’t able to envision. As someone who has lived in Okemos for 18 years and Ann Arbor for 8 months, I have never gone through a transition like the one I did adopting to “city life.” This experience was not really stressful to me at all (adopting to work was a little bit more so), but it has given me firsthand experience in many of the social issues that I can only hear about from those places (although Mid-town isn’t all that different in many ways…). The biggest, most dramatic change I feel that I have gone through is acquiring a broader perspective.
At this point I feel there are so many doors which are newly open to me, from very familiar ones to others that are more distant and mysterious. Some may seem older, more traditional; others may be polished, fancy, and enchanting to my particular taste. A whole world lies beyond each and every one of them, and I have a feeling that I’ll curiously stumble through one of them sooner than I expect.
PS shout out to Ana for teaching me how to take care of my curls. and to Noor if she reads this blog post like she says she does. and to Ryan for “letting” me beat him at fifa. and most importantly, to Gloria simply for serving as an example of how to create positive change in this world.
