~*~FINAL REFLECTION~*~
I realized earlier that I never wrote a reflection on Week 7. I guess it's okay, though, since I only went into work once that week to do my exit interview - a verbal rendition of what I was planning to write in this post. This is both a final reflective post and a summary of some of the things I went over in my exit interview.
Here's what I managed to get done in just seven weeks:
compiled a press list for the Poor People's Campaign;
transcribed two of Rev. Barber's sermons and three or four interviews conducted by members of the Poverty Initiative with grassroots leaders from across the nation;
organized and attended both meetings of the Moral Mondays Immersion course at Union;
organized and attended the weekend-long Immersion trip to Raleigh, NC for the HKonJ Moral March;
attended in-office meetings;
and scanned and digitally organized the Poverty Initiative archives.
In short, quite a bit.
This job was extremely different from my last FWT internship, which I did at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery on the Hudson in New York. While I learned a lot during both internships, this one felt more like a Job: I was more or less a typical Connecticut commuter at an office job in the city. My relationship to work, therefore, was also very different this time around. The quiet residential environment of the monastery made it feel like I was always working while simultaneously not working. The jobs I did were integrated into my daily schedule, with the exception of the audio work that I set away time for. On the days that I went into the city this FWT, work began in the morning (usually around 10) and ended in the afternoon or evening when I went back home. I was more or less always working on an assignment, sometimes multiple in a day. The days that I worked from home were more flexible, but I still found myself setting aside blocks of time during which I would only transcribe sermons or find contacts for the press list. I became accustomed to living within a work/free time binary.
Making a weekly reflective post instead of waiting to write a cumulative FWT essay brought me closer to the work I was doing. At the beginning, when I felt like I might be in over my head, making notes of the jobs I did and the people I encountered broke down the week into manageable pieces. Any job that has the ultimate goal of social change can feel overwhelming, as if the entire world is on your shoulders. This was especially the case for me, an intern with little experience in anti-poverty work. My weekly reflections took the pressure of Making a Difference off of me enough to let me get a grip on the assignments given to me and my personal role in the office.
The only issue I came across with the required weekly updates was remembering to do them. No, not because I'm a particularly forgetful student. My job was so multifaceted and fast paced that I sometimes got caught up in the rush - coordinating my schedule, working on projects, figuring out how to meet up with everyone at marches or meetings outside of the office, etc. I mentioned earlier that this internship felt like a Job to me; I sometimes got so used to that mindset that I forgot that I was still a college student with reflective obligations.
When I was reading the guidelines for reflective blogs, I chuckled a bit at the part reminding us not to air our organizations' dirty laundry. I was never compelled to do something like that, for the record; I was very content at my job. The issue with public reflection compared with informal reflection to Sarah or my family was that I was constantly reminded that the world could be watching at any moment. There were some days I decided I couldn't write a coherent or polished reflection because I was so drained from work and travel that all I probably would have written was about how I was a work zombie, dead to the world. Since I'd decided to make my blog geared toward fellow students and advisors, it was always tough deciding what would be professional to share and what would make me sound like I was about to pour out the contents of my soul. That being said, the eyes of the world kept me grounded. I was constantly thinking about why I was doing the work and how it would inform my future studies both at Bennington and elsewhere, instead of thinking about how much food cost and why on earth I decided to work in the Northeast in the dead of winter. Public reflection kept my priorities straight, to be sure.
I entered my internship uncertain of how I could be useful at an initiative working to advance the rights of a demographic I do not belong to. All of my social justice experience was theoretical, the sort of work done in any classroom of well-meaning, yet significantly privileged, progressive college students. I have now strengthened my grasp on the vocabulary used to approach issues of race and class, and better understand what it means to stand in solidarity. I made connections with Union Theological Seminary and may eventually apply to their M.Div program - in my last week, I learned that Union has a dual degree program in Divinity and Social Work with Columbia University, which is the type of program I'm currently hoping to get into. On a less serious yet equally important note, I became comfortable using the New York transit system and minimized the number of times I got lost.
Overall, I'd give this experience a 10 out of 10 and would definitely recommend it to others who have an interest in social justice, the intersection of religion and human rights, and working with grassroots organizers with the goal of building an anti-oppressive social system.
