Week 4: Belugas!

Time: 02/10-02/16, 15.75 hours

Topics: The Pros and Cons of a Remote Internship.

Tools: Prismic, Gatsby.

Summary:

This week a majority of my hours were spent fine-tuning the blog. I felt like I was finally adjusting to life in Woodlawn and so I began venturing outside of the apartment to work on my internship and course work in various corners of the city. That month Shedd was free for Illinois residents and I took advantage of the fact that I was working remotely and spent many hours in the basement with the belugas. Something I loved about working down there was Shedd’s insanely-fast-for-an-aquarium wifi and the shimmering blue light wavering over my laptop and books. This was my view:

For the rest of the team in Boston, TechStars was in full swing so that kept Joe and Peter pretty busy. I kept in touch with Cyril, who helped me debug a few of my graphic queries.

The Pros and Cons of a Remote Internship: One of my favorite things about interning remotely was the fact that I could complete internship hours at the Shedd Aquarium. Other places I would frequent were: the University of Chicago, Build Coffee, Greenline Coffee, and the Art Institute. This freedom was very comfortable and my mobility around the city was a privilege. However my decision to intern remotely distanced me from the community I was living near to. From conversations with other Wheaton in Chicago students after each week of work, I could tell that I was not attending to place in the way that Dr. Karen Johnson encourages in her paper titled Placing Vocation. I was not learning from my immediate surrounding community. I decided to work more locally and visit a different minority church every Sunday. It also helped that my Urban planning class spent many hours discussing the history of housing in Chicago and helped break down my subconscious stereotypes on the poor and racial/ethnic minority communities of Chicago.