Personal Narrative: The Dallas Christian College Internship

When I worked St. Rita's open house I spoke to families looking to send their child or children there. I told them about my experience at St. Rita and how it made me the person I am today. I told them I about the clubs and sports they have the ones the I was involved in.

From May to August of 2017 I had an internship at Shady Hollow Country Club. While there I worked under the event planner and had experience planning and running events. I also had time to work in the food operations of the country club. Lastly, I was able to experience management. I was able to go to manager meetings, help with scheduling, and purchasing. Lastly, through all of these experiences I was able to excel in guest communication. I even had the opportunity to work at the front desk of the country club and be the first face of Shady Hollow that people

At Mount Vernon, students take a week and either go on an educational trip, or they do an internship. I chose to go on a mission trip to South Carolina. Every day we went to the Babcock center to work with adults with disabilities. We also spent time discussing what it means to have a servant heart and learning how to live in community with each other. We cooked communal meals, had worship every night and the leader of the trip brought in

was of value to me, when looking for a job and needing references. My preceptor is one of the most positive, encouraging people I have ever come across. He gives you the opportunity to learn as long as you want to. Doing my internship at Sheppard Pratt Health System, gave me the opportunities to see what kind of roles exist in healthcare Management duties. I worked ventrally in the entire department of the hospital; because of my role in the internship (Healthcare Management). I needed to know how the hospital operates if I were to be an Operational Director or an Administrative Manager/Director someday. The internship was what I expected, although I did not read anything about this site from previous interns. The best part of my internship was attending

For my internship, I had the opportunity to intern at the YWCA of San Diego in the program Becky’s House. It is a program specifically for women and children escaping domestic violence. Out of three interns, I was the only fortunate one selected to work in the domestic violence shelter as well as the transitional housing program. It was a drastic change from day to day working in both settings.

Considering that I will be going to Seminary at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in the fall, I think that a summer internship at FBC Bentonville would be a perfect way to prepare myself for full time vocational ministry. While my major at OBU is pastoral ministry, I feel that student ministry is more suited for my skillset at this time, because I have much more experience talking to teenagers, and I feel that I can relate to them better at this time in my life. I also feel that working with students over the summer is a great way to get practical experience in ministry and also to serve the Lord in a way that I feel gifted.

The biggest struggle I had while doing my intern was working with other interns. Two of the interns I had to work with, I found them to be highly sensitive and zealous for their theology. I witness one of the interns disrespectfully blowing up at a professor just because she felt the professor was attacking her denomination and her church. Knowing her temperament and outburst attitude, made it very unpleasant to work around her. I felt like I had to walk on eggshells every time I was around her. In addition to that, I got into a fight with the other intern. The fight was over Biblical interpretation. I had to apologize to her, either wise I knew my internship was going to be a living hell. Her zealous for her denomination was overwhelming, that made me feel unpleasant to work with her. I felt so uncomfortable being around these two individuals, that I was dreading every time I had to go to Living Water Christian Counseling for my intern.

There wasn’t much I learned from there other than learning how to grade paper, but I kind of already knew much about that. I learned some communication skills. I would say that because I barely liked talking to anymore but going to a internship everyday made me realize I have to talk no matter what. The kids will talk to you and the teachers, principals and other adults that work in that building. No matter where you go or what part of the building you are in everyone will talk to you and I had to learn to get over my shyness and start talking back to these people.

Activities and Experiences: There were many tasks performed while at this internship. The first task was learning how to do requests for information (RFIs) with the system that the company uses. When imputing the information into there are many different tabs and steps that you have to go trough. Once you input them into the system you then have to send them out to the appropriate people/company so that they can answer you request for information. Being able to learn the new system was easy since the past 3 years I have and to learn how to do things differently and adapt. The second task I preformed numerous times of the past four months was doing estimates. I did many takeoffs for many different buildings, and divisions while I was here at the company. The takeoffs that I preformed were challenging, but I was able to get them done because of the classes I have taken. Back at Texas A&M we have two semester long estimating classes that we are required to take, and in these classes we learn the basics of estimating. The basic principles that were

To be honest, I had nervous expectations coming into a new year of youth group because I had just gotten out of an unsuccessful summer romance with a fellow sponsor that I volunteer at TIC with every week. However, my fears were unnecessary; the added expectations of this internship helped me focus less on the awkwardness of the failed relationship and focus more on my youth ministry efforts. When I was a freshman sponsor, there was a Dordt senior sponsor who interned under the church and was paid by the church for her work. I always felt the shame of being under my processor’s shadow of high expectations because I feel like I’m not good enough to have New Life want to pay me. This may sound bad, but I actually had low expectations for my practicum this semester. I didn’t expect it to be much different from the volunteering that I had already been doing with New Life for the past two years. I expected the general blanket statements of the goals that all youth workers expect: being able to grow in my relationships with students in order to help these teens grow in their relationship with God. If I’ve learned anything from my experiences, though, I’ve learned that you can never really expect anything in youth ministry.

I learned something about myself during this internship program. One of the most important things that I learned is skill. During internship, the opportunity to get new knowledge is everywhere, which includes knowing how to fulfil task relevant to my desired career path and I can become better by spending time to sharpening and honing my skills during the internship.

This internship has been a valuable opportunity to gain skills that will help my future academic and professional careers. At the beginning of the semester we outlined a few goals that we wanted to achieve over the course of the internship, I believe that I have been successful at completing these goals. First, I was able to shadow a senior therapist. When doing so I spent the day seeing the types of things that my supervisor does. This was a very cool experience because I believe I was able to do my job better after shadowing her. Stefanie does a really good job of communicating with our clients effectively when they are feeling stressed or upset. She is able to use a variety of strategies to let them know that something they are doing might be hurtful or inappropriate and the children usually respond very well.

After finding a ministry that I felt would both be challenging a rewarding I signed up to volunteer at the Franciscan Outreach Association, an emergency

After reading through the book I began to compile what my youth ministry would look like and how these different perspectives on life have influenced and changed my view of a student ministry.

My community service internship was a big challenge for me and demanded a lot of hard work and researches, but it was worth it at the end of the day because I knew all the patients were having fun and improving themselves.