I began the year interviewing for internships, travelling from state to state hoping to impress someone enough to find a match in the crazy selection process. At the end of February I found out the results and matched successfully. The whole experience was a bit overwhelming, but I finally wrote about the outcome and my future in April. For the next few months I prepared for the transition, focusing on anniversaries, finding a new home, saying my first goodbyes, taking a Disney vacation, and saying my last goodbyes.
In mid-July I moved to Dallas and began the second half of my year, transitioning from graduate student to predoctoral intern. I learned my way around Dallas and tried to understand my new identity away from school as I became an adult again. Then, once the work year began, I pledged to write weekly about my internship experience. I'm proud to say that I've kept up with it pretty well, and have grown both as a writer and an intern because of it. I have written about:
- Understanding my role, and trying to be patient during orientation.
- Being new, finding my place, my way, and myself during the first month in the schools.
- As I got deeper in my work, I explored the value of building rapport with my children, the danger of wanting to save them them all, what my niche is within my profession, and what I have learned from working with urban youth.
- To keep my sanity in such an intense job, I thought about how to keep healthy, started a novel (which I didn't keep up with this fall but do want to continue), counted down to holidays, considered life changes (some of which have worked out better than others), took pictures of flowers and pumpkins, and wrote about how much I hate being cold.
- Finally, in a couple posts, particularly this one, I celebrated new friends and new life (in this case, my adorable new cousin Grey), and said goodbye to friends, but more importantly those we lost, especially my aunt Debbie who died at the end of September.
So, that is 2011. It's what I might call pre-2012. I had a major transition, moved to a new city, and took on a new role. 2012 may bring the same experiences on another level. In August I will graduate (finally? or already?) and find a job. The job could be here in Dallas, in a city I've lived in before (anyone in San Antonio want to hire me?), or wherever a great opportunity takes me. So next year's blog could read like this year's- a spring of working and hoping for a job (but without the stress of the internship match, thankfully!), a summer move, and a fall of adjusting to a new role. Or, I could end up with something more familiar, but either way 2012 brings a great deal of transition. Fortunately, it's the last major year of transition in my college career. I can't wait for 2012.
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