Summer Intern Reflections: Community Engagement
When I started at The Spark Mill this summer, I was really excited to get to do community engagement. I knew that as an intern I would have a variety of tasks in the office, from transcribing reports to filing and even making store runs. Apart from that, I also knew I was going to get the chance to meaningfully interact with people in my city in a way I never had before. What I didn't know was the extent to which I was going to be challenged. Somehow in my excitement to get started, it didn't dawn on me that community engagement is exactly what it sounds like. Engaging with the community. I expected the note-taking for interviews. I even thought I might get to conduct one myself. What I didn’t see coming was the wonderful world of "intercept interviews."
All of a sudden, my summer internship went from working in an office and the occasional Zoom, to being the “survey person” you see at every event you've ever been to. Personally, I am the kind of person who avoids people with iPads or clipboards out of the fear that they will want to talk to me, so imagine my surprise when all of a sudden I found myself outside, iPad in hand, approaching people in public and asking them to tell me their thoughts. In all of the time I spent doing that kind of community engagement, I gained a new sense of appreciation both for how difficult and how important that job is.
Now that my time at The Spark Mill is coming to an end, I feel like I’m really able to reflect on my experience. All of the aspects of this job have taught me something (usually to do with time management…), but I learned more from doing community engagement than anything else. Beyond being pushed out of my comfort zone and learning to do new things, what I truly took away from this summer was the value of listening. The most community engagement I had done before this summer was interviewing a friend for a school project. On that scale, the “data” that I collected did not go anywhere, and more importantly, the result of my data gathering was nothing but a grade. In the real world, the people I talked to and the data I gathered went somewhere. After someone took a survey or did an interview, the things they said went into a report. That report went on to promote actual change.
Regardless of what that change may have been, it has been a radically different experience to know that the work I was doing was affecting something other than my GPA. Of all of the things I expected from this job, it never once occurred to me that what I was doing, even as an intern, would actually make an impact. Getting to be a part of change-making this summer has been an incredible privilege both in the value of the lessons I learned and in the reminder that every voice makes an impact.