The Internship Experience

I just finished the fifth week of an amazing internship. Since I'm not sure of the consequences of revealing where I am, I will keep it quiet until otherwise told.

But I can tell you other stuff. Like having amazing challenges to my skills - I'm writing things that I only did in the classroom - only this is the real deal. And the really great thing is that the people I am working for actually like what I'm doing! I can think creatively and not feel like my ideas are going to be seen as inferior or looked at like I'm stupid. My ideas, good or bad, have a purpose now. I'm no longer sitting on the sidelines feeling twinges of jealousy because someone else had a fabulous idea that I wish I could have come up with. Now I'm an idea person and it's wonderful!

I've worked long enough to know that things won't always be this way. Someone will feel threatened by my ideas or mere existence and make my life miserable. Someone may steal my ideas and claim them for their own. I know.

But now, as I'm looking out over the bluffs along the Mississippi and watching a river roll by as it has done for thousands of years, I feel like I finally belong somewhere.

Now that I've shared my philosophical meanderings, I'll meander a little more.

The office I'm in is located along the Mississippi River and the view is magnificent! I've seen an eagle swoop by through the trees (at least I think it was an eagle - she didn't stop to introduce herself), a young beaver watched me eat my lunch from about a 100 yards away and he decided to take a nap on a concrete step. A mockingbird flew so close to me that I could see the gray and white detail of his feathers and hear his beautiful songs as clear as anything I have ever heard.

The river is a beautiful thing. I've lived close to it and crossed over it many times all my life and never really took the time to appreciate it. The flow of the currents are a balm to the spirit - easy to say from the shoreline.

The internship will draw to a close in two more weeks and I wish it would go on a little longer. Projects I have worked on still have not been completed and won't be for quite awhile. I would love to see my ideas come to fruition. My supervisor has promised to send me the finished products once they are completed. But I think the thing I have gained the most is the feeling that I can go out into the work world a little better educated and certainly more confident in my skills as a communicator.

I also want to hang around to see that little beaver grow up!