Being able to not only help out in communities but objectively study social interactivity and networking.
What I wish was different
Advice
Fit in as much volunteer opportunities as you can. This helps us to give back to society as well as prepare for the future in our academia and careers.
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Internship
June - December 2018 • Akron, OH
What I liked
The opportunity daddy gave me to intern.
What I wish was different
Nothing
Advice
It was very rewarding.
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Program Leader
June - July 2018 • Goleta, CA
What I liked
As a program leader in United Way's Fun In The Sun (FITS) summer program, you get to work with like-minded and dedicated staff and with awesome kids from all walks of life. As a team, you work together to create an enriching and fun summer experience for students while getting the opportunity to organize a classroom environment tailored to your individual strengths. If you love teaching, each leader teaches a lesson every day in the field of mathematics, language arts, STEAM, or PE (depending on what you apply to teach) for all the students in the program. Leaders also get to organize games, team-building activities, arts and crafts, extracurricular lessons, and more while working with their students. On a more technical level, the pay is very generous and daily hours allows employees to maximize their time and earning potential as they would in a full-time position without serious commitments (especially for students who don't have classes in the summer). Overall, this job allows you to change the lives of children for the better and have fun doing it.
What I wish was different
Each summer brings new challenges that you may not have seen before, or you'll be so booked by all that the daily activities that you need to have the dust settle before getting into your groove. The six weeks FITS is in session go by so quickly that you may come up with so many new and amazing ideas, strategies, and activities and run out of time to do them! The best you can do is keep the ideas locked in memory and hope to implement them for an even better summer next year.
Advice
The experience someone gets from FITS is amazingly rewarding but is also very intense. Any job working with young students is going to be physically, mentally, and emotionally taxing at times, and FITS is no exception. New hires and those with experience alike will sometimes feel like they are in over their heads with all the demands and pressure the job entails. An effective solution I have found helpful when in this position is maintaining a healthy relationship with your team and taking the time to consider yourself amid all the responsibilities that may take over. Your team will consist of like-minded people sharing your goal of being the most effective for your students, and all of them, regardless of their experience, will be able to support you at all times. Asking for help may be hard to do when you feel like you need to be the solution to all of your students' problems and therefore all of your own, but that's not the case. Help your teammates help you. Take the time to help yourself as well, because what you don't want is burn out. Take a moment to sit and consider everything, make time in the day to healthily release stress that may accrue from the day, take deep breaths even in the middle of a stressful situation to clear your mind. If you take care of yourself in general, however you choose to do so, you will gain a fantastic amount of experience and have an incredible amount of fun at this job.
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Activity Coordinator
May - July 2018 • San Diego, CA
What I liked
Working with the children to encourage them to read
What I wish was different
I wish I could have worked with the kids longer.
Advice
Patience is a virtue, and sometimes the children don't understand things right away. They need constant reminders and validations in the process of learning.
