Taking initiative

I can’t believe it’s already the end of Week 6! At first it was feeling really slow, because I had to go from 0 to 35 hours average of actually doing something. Now, it’s feeling like there’s never enough time for anything!

I did start feeling myself grow throughout these weeks. For one, I started the Schweitzer Fellow Project. It’s a project where you interview with Schweitzer Fellows and/or their mentors about their public health projects and seeing if they were sustainable or not. Before now, I was always in an interview with my supervisor if I had to talk with someone other than her. But now, I am starting to gather information from interviewees by myself. The same thing is happening with my other current project, MOTION Project 2. For Project 2, I have to collect data on emergency food efforts occurring in Detroit and the region in response to COVID 19. This required interviewing multiple local and regional food organizations to get information on their current programming, what’s working with it, what’s not, etc. Right now I’ve reached out to main organizations on MOTION’s behalf (something that has never happened before, usually it’s the other way around), and I imagine that the interviews will be with the leadership of the organization, Jasmine and I. Once again, without our supervisor. I feel like this moment is like the training wheels coming off. We’ve seen last month how it’s like to run an efficient meeting; now it’s our turn!

This is definitely taking me out of my comfort zone (as in one of my past blogs I said that I am usually the attentive, yet quieter person in the room). But I definitely feel like these newer experiences in my internship will take me out of that shell and give me some better communication and collaboration skills!