My Internship:
The official title of my internship is "F1 Grants". The Southern DataStream web site describes my opening as follows:
F1.
Grant WritingInternship Project for Engineer, Environmental Scientist or Liberal Arts Major
Southern DataStream is always in the process of applying for a new project grant. The internship project involves working with a diverse team of scientists and subcontractors to assemble a response to a "request for proposals" (RFP). It requires a self-motivated, aggressive person seeking to learn the how-to's of grant writing and team building. Good written English language skills are a requirement.
Whilst I may not be particularly aggressive, and have lapses in self-motivation like anyone else, I was probably chosen for this placement as the skills which being a Modern History major require, i.e. coordinating different viewpoints into a presentable and acceptable answer, are very similar to those expected from grant writing. Thus there is an answer to the frequent, and probably apt question I tend to get here, "If you are doing a history major- what the hell are you doing at an agricultural engineering company?" Good question I guess. Grant writing is basically contemporary history writing. Politics, economics and social aspects all, like history, have to be accounted for, exploited and concocted. The only trouble is you can't influence people in the past, like you can in the present. And that's the major difference to exploit here at Southern DataStream.
Apart from grant writing (for an example see the Mentorship proposal ), another aim of my internship is to introduce "higher social topics into the conversations of interns". While unsure of what this actually required to start with, it seems that the intention was for me to encourage a broader level of interaction between the interns. Thus I am setting up the Intern Seminar Series which is intended to increase an understanding between interns' of their diverse cultures, viewpoints and backgrounds, and to generally enrich the interns' experience here at Southern DataStream. The third aspect of my internship is to arrange and coordinate lunchtime meetings between John and individual interns.
Thus I will carry on in this scope throughout my internship, with new projects and hopefully inspirational ideas (!).