Where has the time gone?

Time is something that I have never been able to master. I remember when the beginning of August rolled around, and making a mental note that I need to blog for PP55. Unfortunately, between searching for an apartment, dealing with management once I found an apartment, packing, dealing with stubborn apartment managers that are only in the office twice a week at the most inconvenient times, trying to reserve apartment elevators, and trying to figure out why on earth a moving company is asking me for a certificate of liability and insurance, I was needless to say somewhat distracted. Oh yeah did I mention that there was also an earthquake and hurricane (both in the same week thrown in there?)

It is amazing how much of difference it makes having a rental, as opposed to sublet apartment. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that renting an apartment would be as stressful as it was. Fortunately, I was able to find an apartment easily by using the NYC Princeton alums listserv. After securing my rental, the complications really began. First of all, I couldn't move into my apartment before the current tenant was out. This was further compounded by the fact that the girl who was moving into my sublet room had to be into my sublet room since she had people moving into her previous apartment. To say the least, it was a mess. Fortunately, everything worked out in the end, and I am now situated at 89th and Columbus on the upper west side.

Even though I am 56 blocks north of my sublet apartment, it is an amazingly different lifestyle. As much as I loved the vivaciousness of Murray Hill and Mid-Town, hearing ambulances whiz by what seemed like every minute on the minute transporting people to the NYU hospital quickly grew tiresome. The Upper West Side has a much more residential feel (I love passing fathers and mothers walking their children to school as I am walking to the subway to go to work in the mornings), and is reminiscent of my life at home in Ohio with all the green trees. Also, in addition to the calmer, quieter, feel, the location is still prime since I am close to the Metropolitan Museum and Natural Museum of History, as well as my current favorite flea market at 77th and Columbus.

Work in Appeals at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office is really picking up. I now have a better appreciation for why I was required to start in June since it took me about two months to master not only my responsibilities, (which consist mostly of exhibits, proofreading, citechecking, and writing ES briefs,) but also gaining the recognition of how to properly prioritize my responsibilities, (a vital skill especially leading up to filing day-which occurs only once a month, and is strikingly similar to Dean's Date with all the lawyers trying to get their briefs to the courts on time.)

Looking forward to this month's adventures. It is amazing how fast time flies when you are no longer in school.

My Adventures with Tommy

During my first few weeks of working at the Association to Benefit Children, I learned very quickly that even though I love kids, I am relatively clueless about how to handle them. With this realization in mind, you might be able to understand the fear that ran through me the day the teacher from the Little Wonders classroom (2 year olds) asked me if I could be a one-on-one chaperone for Tommy (name changed for confidentiality) on their trip to the Children’s Museum. Tommy is that infamous student who is continually acting out, throwing tantrums, and causing havoc. Everybody at ABC has a story to tell about his outrageous behavior. And he would be MY responsibility for the whole trip. Despite my apprehensions, I decided to go. At least it would get me out from behind my desk for a day.

When I met Tommy on the day of the trip, his adorable curly hair and big, sweet eyes lulled me into a false sense of security. He was so cute, surely he couldn’t be as bad as everyone said! When we arrived at the museum, our first stop was an awesome Curious George themed room. Tommy and I played, we laughed, we ran around. Everything was great—until it was time to go to the next room. Tommy did not want to leave, so he started running. You think that playing four years of Varsity soccer would have given me an edge over a 2 year old, but I couldn’t catch him or get him to stop running. The head teacher, Aaron, had to help me corral Tommy like a loose chicken. It was quite the scene.

From there, our day alternated between moments of fun and times of complete chaos. Here are some highlights: I ended up with a wet spot in a most unfortunate location at the Splash City exhibit thanks to a large bucket of water I didn't see coming; there was an embarrassing plastic banana throwing incident in the Dora the Explorer room; and in the last room, Tommy climbed up to the top of a space rocket slide and then refused to come down, trapping several other kids inside. Eventually, it was time to go home and I was exhausted. At the same time, I felt proud that I had survived and I knew I could handle any kid after this. Also, Tommy and I had bonded during our day, a fact that was proven when he ran up to me the next day and gave me a big hug. Now, everyday Tommy and I spend 30 minutes playing together in the morning to tire him out a bit and he is behaving much better. He might be hard to handle, but I’m pretty sure Tommy is a good-hearted kid who just has too much energy and a pretty serious mischievous streak. Even so, I wouldn’t try to change him into one of the "well-behaved" kids for anything.

A few weeks in...

Hi everyone!

I’ve been working at Echoing Green for just under a month now. Echoing Green is a social entrepreneurship nonprofit and for the past 25 years it has been known for its fellowship program that provides seed funding to individuals starting nonprofits and for-profits with a social impact mission. I’m working in the Communications department, which is developing a new branch of Echoing Green’s work surrounding the book, Work on Purpose. The book and accompanying workshops aim to guide Millenials (us! - people ages 18-32) towards following their passions and finding a purposeful career. In many ways, this overlaps with the mission of our Princeton Project 55 fellowship program which is offering us viable opportunities to work in a field or community that is important to us.

Besides the incredibly friendly staff and the great work environment, I’ve enjoyed learning about the range of responsibilities and opportunities that fall within my purview as Communications Associate. Three weeks into the semester at Princeton, it felt like I’d been taking that set of courses my whole life, but at Echoing Green I feel that I’m constantly learning and the more I am able to accomplish throughout the day, the more responsibility I’ll be given. It has taken longer than I expected to learn the ropes, and I’m definitely still learning, but I’m also starting to get the hang of all of Echoing Green’s systems.

I lived with a friend in NY for the first three weeks of work and it was a lot of fun to sample city-life, but for now, until I find an apartment/roommate, I’ll be commuting from home (Princeton Junction). It’s strange to pass by campus and know that all of the new freshmen are getting ready for OA/CA [or getting evac-ed because of the rain, as the case may be], but I suppose that’s how the cycle goes.

Looking forward to reading about your experiences.

Rebecca

Two months in

One of the things I enjoy doing most in my job is sitting in on meetings--not that my personal tasks aren't exciting, but meetings are a nice break in the routine and a great chance to learn more about topics I'm unfamiliar with... like how an organization works. Even though Aeras is a nonprofit, it has a budget and a certain set of goals like any other business, so I'm getting introduced to concepts like how to promote investment and efficiency. A new vocab word I've learned is stage-gating, or a standard of criteria for deciding what products should continue to be developed. With limited funds, not every vaccine product will undergo proof-of-concept trials that cost millions of dollars and involve thousands of participants. Last week, I got to sit in on some stage-gating meetings for current products, which made clear how the process works and highlighted specific clinical benchmarks that have to be passed for a vaccine to progress in development.

One thing I remember past fellows enthusing over was how much free time they had in the evening thanks to working nine-to-fives with no homework. I have yet to experience this feeling, but to be fair, until recently I've been dedicating most of my free time to dealing with plans for next year. I think what it comes down to is that I need to force myself to schedule some extracurriculars into my weekly routine to ensure that I get all that I want out of this fellowship year. There's time for it if it's planned; otherwise, making dinner, hitting the gym (Sarah, don't rat me out for this being a lie) and relaxing with some high-brow reality T.V. (ahem- The Bachelorette) can easily consume an evening.

Tomorrow I'm going to attend the TB Vaccine Scientific Symposium, co-sponsored by Aeras and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). I will be taking notes all day in order to later write up summaries of the talks, so I'm going to turn in early in order to be awake enough to do a good job. That's one thing that's certainly different from college: you can't live like a night owl because there's no such thing as an afternoon nap in the working world!

First Week Finished

Roosevelt intersects with California as a boarded-up warehouse. There’s a pothole you have to avoid, and then you’re running down south next to the park. At 19^th Street you take a right. After a few blocks, you pull up in front of one of three branches of the Carole Robertson Center for Learning.

The Center was named after one of the victims of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. When I showed up on Monday for orientation (which consisted mostly of six square blocks of forms, occasionally livened up by the seriously friendly staff members in charge of making sure I understood what I was signing) I was handed a brief article by Angela Davis. Davis writes,

…it occurred to me that the way the memory of that episode persists in popular imagination is deeply problematic. What bothers me most is that their names have been virtually erased: They are inevitably referred to as ‘the four Black girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing.’ Another traumatic moment occurred in 1964 when James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were killed in Mississippi. A decade earlier, Emmett Till was found at the bottom of the Tallahatchie River. These boys, whose lives were also consumed by racist fury, still have names in our historical memory. Carole, Denise, Addie Mae, and Cynthia do not.

Part of my work at Carole Robertson will be an oral history project. This week I talked with Michelle, the teacher I will be working with most closely, about how we might go about it. She was very excited when I mentioned the possibility of such a project, especially when I floated the idea of one focused on the Center, which is celebrating its 35^th anniversary this year. She told me about how, right before I arrived, the director addressed students and parents and asked whether anyone knew who Carole Robertson was. None of the students did.

I’m at the Center in a very vague capacity as a “School Age and Youth Literacy Specialist.” I perch in various locations around the building and do my thing. On Tuesday, “my thing” consisted of helping to inventory and organize roughly ten million books provided to teachers through a grant. Wednesday, my thing was a different thing: hanging out in classrooms and getting to know the kids I’ll eventually be working with. Thursday was more meetings and lesson planning and getting to know more about the Center as a whole. Today: more kids, ice cream, games, and teaching approximately sixteen teenage and preteen girls how to fold fortunetellers, which they called cootie catchers. Next week and into the foreseeable future, the real thing: theater and creative writing and oral history oh my!

We’ll see what the kids like best—I’m guessing theater, and I’m trying to plan accordingly—but I’m going to try very hard not to lose sight of history. It’s the reason any of us are doing what we’re doing right now.

For now, I’m looking forward to the Labor Day weekend, as I have been throughout this first (exhausting, confusing, awesome) week. Like many other Fellows, I’m not sure that what I’m doing this year will be something I want to pursue for the rest of my life, but I’m trying to make everything I do meaningful, from lesson planning to helping clean the floor after snack time. The sense that the Carole Robertson Center is part of history helps.

First Post

Hi everyone,

This is my first post, after having just finished my first month at CityBridge. CityBridge is a family foundation that works to build and sustain a high-performing public school system in DC. CityBridge has two major areas of focus. One is our stewardship and engagement work, which involves engaging local philanthropists and civic leaders in the DC education reform space. The other is research and investment, which involves best practices research on education reform and making investments in high-performing organizations in DC. As a research analyst, I'm working primarily on the research and investment side of things.

It's been a great first month. The work that I'm doing at CityBridge is fascinating, exciting, and challenging all at once. I've been learning a lot about DC education reform, as well as about all the different work being done by my colleagues at CityBridge. I've gotten immersed in some of the projects I'll be working on, including our work on school turnaround in DC as well as the newly emerging work of ours on community engagement around education reform.

One of the most exciting parts of my job so far has been the chance to sit around a table with my colleagues on the research team and strategize about the direction of our work. I'm looking forward to many more of these conversations going forward. I've attended several interesting panel discussions so far, including one panel at the Fordham Institute with Rick Hess and Randi Weingarten, two big names in the education reform world. And lastly I can't fail to mention my first staff outing, which was a fun day of kayaking on the Potomac and hiking around Roosevelt Island. Thanks to everyone else for such interesting posts!

A Learning Experience

I've been in New York working now for almost two months and I'm just now writing my first blog post. Why? Because honestly, I've felt overwhelmed. Between trying to figure out how things work around the office and what is expected of me combined with trying to settle in to a new apartment in a new city with new roommates, I haven't felt like I could write a blog post that contains the kind of stories that I imagine the PP55 staff and community would like to hear. I've decided however that sugar-coating my experience would be a disservice to all.
To be honest, my attitude about my fellowship varies dramatically. Overall, I think I'm much happier than during the first few weeks when I felt totally clueless but there are still some days when I come home and say "Wow, that was rough." To clarify, by no means I am saying there is something WRONG with my organization or my fellowship...I just don't think what I am doing right now is what I want to be doing long-term and sometimes it's difficult to feel excited about the work. But hey, that's what a fellowship is supposed to be about right? TRYING something new and evaluating whether or not it is something that you would like to pursue further. For me, what I'm doing on a daily basis is not what I would like to be doing forever and I think that's OK and important to figure out. I also think it's important to be honest about!