WRITTEN PORTION. Please respond to all questions thoroughly. (minimum one paragraph per question)
1. Describe the projects and tasks you worked on and the results that were achieved as a result of your efforts.
2. What skills did you use most often in your work? What new skills and abilities did you develop and how will they be helpful to you in the future?
3. Describe any difficulties and challenges you experienced and how you addressed them over the course of your internship.
4. Describe any “critical moments” and experiences that shifted your perceptions of the world of work, the field, yourself as a professional, and/or the organization for which you interned.
5. Having observed and engaged with professionals, what makes one “successful?”
6. How did your academic studies help to prepare you for this internship? How will this experience inform your future studies when you return to Smith?
7. In what ways did your internship contribute to your larger career and/or academic goals? How have your goals shifted? Where do you see yourself headed now that you didn’t before?
8. “This I believe…” What do you know/believe about yourself now as a professional….
The poem below is by Marge Piercy. If you wish, you are welcome to share your responses, reflections, thoughts, reactions, and ideas about the piece, her ideas on work, and your own experience “being of use.”
To be of use
by Marge Piercy
The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves,
an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move
things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
"To be of use" by Marge Piercy © 1973, 1982.
From CIRCLES ON THE WATER © 1982 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and Middlemarsh, Inc.
|
