Three months in

I realize this post is long overdue. In late June, the morning after I had gotten back from my Spain vacation that I had barely been able to squeeze in after graduation, I started work at the Heads Up! Pediatric Literacy Program. After being on the job for three months, my perspective on my role in this nonprofit has swayed back and forth between the good and the (somewhat) bad, and I supposed I'd talk a bit about that here.

As coordinator of the literacy program, your job is essentially to keep the program running and functioning. There are books that need to be restocked two floors above my office, right inside of the clinic where doctors will have access to them. There are volunteers - retired women, mostly - who run the book carts, report back to you about whatever is needed, and pleasantly chat with you about your weekend and plans for the future. There are also multiple locations in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens that must be visited, maintained, and well stocked with books. The coordinator is in charge of buying and receiving these books, once the program has received its thousands of dollars of funding. The coordinator also has the freedom to use downtime, of which there has been plenty in the past couple of weeks, to decide what aspects of the program can be improved and to take charge and implement those changes.

When I started working here, I was excited yet quite terrified. My predecessor, Ben, had been very good about guiding me for our one week of overlap, but I didn't know how I would handle this entire program once he left. When he did leave, I'd often send  him sheepish text messages asking about where certain book locations were, usually because I'd already walked around the area several times and couldn't for the life of me remember anything. That's the thing about this job - once the previous fellow leaves, you realize just how independent this job really is. Even though I was scared of screwing up, I embraced this job's freedom and felt like this would provide me a fantastic and certainly unique opportunity as a new college grad. I still do embrace it, but there are certainly negatives to working in such an independent atmosphere.

One reason is that it's difficult to get feedback on whatever it is you're working on. My boss is absolutely wonderful, and she is always there to help and to talk to when I need her. However, she has her own, many responsibilities as a child psychologist in Weill Cornell, and I often prefer to not distract her with the day to day business of the job. Also, when you encounter frustrating things -- such as ordering books from absolutely incompetent book vendors, who force you to spend weeks talking to customer service representatives, inconvenience you with several instances of miscommunication, and send you completely incorrect book shipments -- it's easy to wish that there was somebody else there who could also help out, or somebody to at least vent to while on the job.

In these past few months, I've learned that this job certainly isn't perfect. Of course, no job is perfect, as there will always be people you don't enjoy interacting with, as well as annoyances that pop up. However, I know that it's important that these day to day things don't get to me too much. After all, it's the goal and mission of this job that I'm working for -- the goal to keep this program running so that the children we serve, who have so little access to outside resources and are at risk for developmental and cognitive delays, have access to new books every time they visit the doctor. Those children, who light up when they receive their books, and who cry and beg their mothers to let them stay just a liiiiiitle longer in the hospital so that they can read with us, are the ones who make this job worth it. This job is a process of learning the importance of overlooking the smaller problems to work toward the greater goals.