Students Blog About Internship Experiences

 
                                                                                                                    Photos by Laura Musser, '09

The Internship has gone high-tech. This year students were given the option of blogging about their experiences instead of turning in a journal as part of their internship requirements.

The blogs allow friends, family and faculty to keep up with students in real-time.

Laura Musser, '09, Eric VanEpps, '10, and Pat Scanlan, '09, are three Jepson students who are blogging about their internships. Musser's blog, "Tales of a Globetrotting Spider," follows her journey as an intern working with Caring for Cambodia, a nonprofit in Siem Reap, Cambodia. The organization sponsors local public schools.

"Before I arrived I was quite uninformed about the Khmer Rouge and the plight met by the Cambodian people in the mid-1970s and beyond, which is astonishing to me because it is estimated that almost 2 million people died under the Khmer Rouge in addition to the hundreds of thousands who perished from the U.S. bombings related to the Vietnam War in northeastern Cambodia," Musser writes.    

"That marks almost 25 percent of their population. How is it that we've heard about genocide in Kosovo and in Germany, but not a thing about what has happened on the soil that I'm now living on?"

VanEpps is interning with Mosaic Community Development, a Christian nonprofit that works with the poor and needy in Omaha, Nebraska.

"We work to do so through relational meals, refugee outreach, neighborhood development, collaboration with other leaders in the area, and by partnering with people as they try to rise out of the cycle of poverty," VanEpps writes in his blog.    

"We all recognize that we're not just here because it's our job, since most jobs pay considerably more," he writes. "We're here because we agree with the mission of MCD and want to live out lives that match the work we do. The strongest "don't" at MCD is fairly straightforward: don't be here unless you love what you and the MCD community are doing." 

Scanlan is interning with Alpine Mountain Builders. Blog

Associate Dean Teresa Williams is hoping that more students will choose to blog about their experiences in the future.

"Right now some companies don't allow their interns to blog," she said. "But I do hope that in the future more students will take advantage of this opportunity if they are interning at sites where blogging is not a concern."

                      Laura Musser on her primary form of transportation in Cambodia.