Week 5: Busy Times and Confidence

I meant to interview my site mentor for this week’s post, but we both forgot during our check-in meeting today (which took up the full scheduled hour on its own). I love the work and atmosphere of my site, both during the first half when I was working at the Professional Development Center and now that I’m at Brenda Scott Academy for summer school (school for both students and new teachers). First off, I really enjoy being “behind the scenes” of professional development and experiencing PD from the background. I’m much more used to experiencing PD as a day off from school.

There’s a large focus on everything running efficiently and on schedule since there’s so much ground to cover for the new teachers before they start in the classroom next week. There are so many pieces moving at once, and it’s surprising to me that such a small team (I think only 6 or 7 central people) is making all of these parts run so smoothly. While I am a bit of a lower priority at the moment and feel that when meetings get pushed back, I always have the full attention of my mentors when we discuss my project and questions. They’ve also been incredibly accommodating to me in terms of working remotely, needing to take time out for appointments, and answering my questions about tasks. Going into this experience, I was nervous I wouldn’t be able to speak up when necessary to get my questions answered and ideas heard. This experience has actually been a real motivator for building that skill because I both really care about the work I’m doing and want to come across as feeling so.

I know that being a college student is advertised as needing to be really accountable for yourself in how to spend your time. While this is true to an extent, there’s still a lot of external motivation from classmates, professors, and advisors (at least, in my experience). Due to this being my experience, I’ve actually worried that I wouldn’t do too well in a professional environment without such external motivation. I love my site because it’s giving me exposure to what will most likely be my future (either sitting in on PD as a teacher or as an administrator/HR developer). I’m quickly becoming more confident in my future post-college, which is a huge relief after not being able to picture a life outside of the student perspective for as long as I can remember.