Success!

We've had a student intern working with us this year, and recently hired another one. They've been absolute blessings! My intern (I say "my" because I'm her direct supervisor, but she's really "ours") designed an amazing poster series for suicide prevention and some general advertising for our services. Let's face it, the old posters were ugly. And cheesy. Yuck, not us at all.

Hers are way better. Here's a partial shot of a nearly-final draft of her poster- I cropped it and added a watermark that doesn't appear in the actual poster, obviously.

I think that little wooden person is our new unofficial mascot! The posters are pretty powerful, no? I know we wouldn't have gotten these done without her hard work and creativity.

So I was a little nervous when I found out recently that the internships offered to students were being examined and we needed to "reapply" to be able to call our positions "internships". Clearly the benefits to the students were great- they can officially call it an internship on their resume, it's a higher level of pay, blah, blah. The benefits to US were huge too- higher minimum requirements, higher pay, learning objectives...all which basically meant that we would be more likely to attract more motivated, qualified students who would be around for a least a full year. Overall, I completely agreed with the decision to re-examine some things campus-wide, but the moment I found out we had to submit a job description, learning objectives, etc., I was overloaded and a little stressed.

Naturally, I had my intern fill out the applications. :-) She did a great job and we worked together to get everything submitted on time.

Then I got an email "suggesting" I make a change that I thought was silly and since I was in the middle of dealing with a few crises on campus, K-Dog and I decided it wasn't really necessary (and by the way, was not required according to their instructions). After a few weeks we got an email requesting additional information from the committee. A handful of tedious, miniscule points of clarification, including the previous suggestion. Again, my rock star intern took a stab at it- one of the points of clarification required percentages of time spent on each of the duties/tasks, so who better would know than the intern doing them? Exactly. Again she and I worked together to get the changes made and submitted.

I found out last week that our internships were approved!! Woohoo! Even better news: my rock star protégée is interested in keeping her position next year! Whew!