Then and Now

The thing about my internship is that it's been going on a lot longer than just five months. I've been working for the cit for about three years now, and this internship is only just a small window to the time I've served for the City of Tempe.
However, at the start of this internship I was handed several new and very important responsibilities in order to keep my job but use it as an internship. My boss had to pull a few strings within our company in order for me to meet my requirements to pull this off as an internship for the school to accept it. In the end, I was given some pretty brutal grunt work and office work. 
A lot of it was physical. Lifting, refilling, storing, dragging, repairing,  and finding equipment, gas, boxes, boats, kayaks, stand up paddle boards, and coolers filled to the brim with ice has been my life for the last five months. It's been pretty rough. I've definitely gotten some serious muscle mass due to this job. Luckily the internship started in the winter so the outside work wasn't that bad until recently. When the heat starts to pick up, work seems to drag on outside and becomes harder just because the sun seems to make everything heavier.

The office work I was suppose to pick up started out well, but soon got difficult because I wasn't in the office often enough to be consistent with my work. Projects that were supposed to last a day or two turned in to a few weeks. In the beginning I was supposed to work a lot with filing rack fees, registration dues, and making sure everyone was properly registered with classes and events before they occurred. In the end, I worked mostly with making sure people renewed their storage fees, emailed out participants with event information, cleaned up the office and help maintain the online website and social media pages.

I think it was a good semester. There was definitely a few long weekends because a special event was going on on the lake that I needed to work or the event needed to be set up. But in the end I learned more than I ever could have imagined just by working close with my bosses and working close with participants and other board committees that put on special events that happened on the lake. Experience is definitely the best tool for me. Learning first hand helps me understand what I'm doing wrong vs. what is right.