Week 1:
Project Transitions

June 1, 2013

Preconceived notions are wrong in approximately 99.8% of all circumstances. And 77.2% of all statistics you read are made up. As a result of both, we must come to our own conclusions. I came into my internship with preconceived notions I didn’t even realize I had. I’d like to go through them one by one and go over why my first week has already flipped them on its head. Before I do that, let me give you an idea of where I am and what I’ve done so far:

Project Transitions (PT) is a non-profit transitional housing, respite care and hospice organization that serves people in central Texas living with HIV/AIDS. The organization has a few apartment complexes, community housing and a hospice house. PT provides people not only with a roof over their heads, but also medical attention (if necessary), connections to any local resources they might need, and, above all, a community that loves and supports them.

My position is as the Programs/Development Intern in the administrative offices. I am privileged to work alongside the staff as we take care of all of the nitty gritty details and logistics. Over the course of the summer, I will get to dip my toes into all of the worlds within Project Transitions. I will be doing everything from reporting on grant funding to managing social media to hopefully taking on my own client case management load.

This week, I was introduced to all of those worlds. I said I would dip my toes in, but I suppose a better way to describe it would be what we Cornell folk are accustomed to- “drinking from a fire hydrant”, as my Directing professor likes to say. As a student of the OCAAT system, I’m used to diving in headfirst and accomplishing a huge amount of intense projects in a single week; and this week, it paid off. I happened to join the PT staff two weeks before one of their biggest fundraisers of the year. Needless to say, it was a busy week. Our staff was keeping up with program duties on top of planning this major silent auction/dance night/gala fundraiser. I was lucky enough to be thrown right in. This week, I:

-Attended meetings for Housing, Management, Hospice (all weekly), and Texas Swing (the big fundraiser)

-Wrote, sealed and sent letters directly to clients inviting them to get involved in another local ASO (AIDS service organization)

-Took over social media publicity and sent out mass emailing for PT/Texas Swing (Check it out- the last week’s worth of posts is a taste of my work: https://www.facebook.com/projecttransitions?fref=ts)

-Overhauled last year’s program for Texas Swing and updated it to prepare it to be sent to the printer yesterday

That was all in 4 days, and those were just the big highlights. Just like the block plan, when you do so much in so little time, I learned a lot. This is where my preconceived notions come in.

I assumed, for some reason, that everything in the professional world worked like a well-oiled machine. I thought everyone would know exactly what they were doing and how they were supposed to do it, and that everyone would be all work, all the time. I never truly considered the social aspect of the office. This week has made me realize how important it is to take time to socialize with coworkers, and that social time is a vital part of the work day to keep people happy. Don’t get me wrong, we work a lot and we work hard-but if you do that 8 hours a day with no breaks like I did my first day, you burn out really quickly. Social time, though it may not be “work,” can be incredibly productive.

The other major conclusion for me this week was the realization of how similar this job is to the work I’ve done in student organizations at Cornell. Just as some of my clubs have different levels in formality of their meeting structure, so too do the different PT administrators have different facilitation styles and quirks (some of which I will attempt to emulate in the future, some of which I know now don’t work for me and I’d like to avoid). Just as I had to learn dance lingo as part of the executive board of Slick Shoes, so too I must learn federal grant lingo to understand the proceedings of a PT housing meeting. The work I’ve been doing as a student leader on campus (running meetings, event planning, etc.) has been directly translating to my internship. I hope my experience will continue to inform my work, and that, with the wonderful support of the staff, I can confidently work through anything and everything PT throws at me! It’s quite the whirlwind so far.

On top of all of that, after learning about case management I found out I might get the opportunity to act as a case manager and take on a client of my own. That person would be mine to connect to resources, walk through the housing process. I cannot possibly put into words how excited and nervous the prospect of my own case load makes me, but I can tell you that my heart skips a beat just thinking about it. I’ll keep you updated!

This week has been more than I hoped and nothing I expected- here’s to 8 more weeks of experiencing, doing, and learning! Thanks for reading!