Chicago Internship Program Experiences: Dave Reid’s Student Highlights
Here at Chicago Center, we want to give you the best picture of what a great comprehensive Chicago internship program can be like and what it can teach you. So we plan to regularly bring you descriptions of our student practicums written by the participants themselves!
By understanding former students’ experiences in their Chicago internships, you can also understand the benefit a Chicago Center practicum can bring to your education, career and life. This week, Dave Reid from Willamette University, talks about his time with the Chicago Center.
Dave’s Chicago Internship Experience
Dave participated in the 2009 Fall semester Urban Academic Practicum. He spent three days a week working in his internship at the Austin Polytechnical Academy, where he worked as a teaching assistant to high school students. One day a week, he took part in our Chicago Communities and Cultures Seminar, and one day a week he took a Directed Studies course. Students are asked to keep an academic journal while participating in Chicago Center, here’s what Dave had to say in his journal summarizing his Chicago Center experience:
Dave Reid works with high school students in his Chicago internship.
“I find it extremely difficult to start writing this assignment. Not because I have nothing to reflect upon or that I can’t find anything positive with my experience here. Rather, my entire experience in Chicago has been so life changing I find it difficult boiling my thoughts down to a simple answer. The Chicago Center experience has allowed me to gain a real-world perspective on my role and position within society by not simply explaining social systems with books and lectures, but rather through faces and personal stories.
I’m struck by how much my priorities and mindset have changed in such a short amount of time. The first voice pedagogy of the Chicago Center has helped give meaning and purpose to all of the theories I’ve read about (and honestly disregarded) in the past. Actually being able to walk around a housing project like Altgeld Gardens, and meet the people that live there is a drastically different experience than if I were to simply read about poverty in America and the residents of public housing. Meeting Cheryl Johnson made me truly invested in the both the successes and struggles of public housing residents.
The Chicago Center has provided my first academic experience in a long time where I’m actually self-motivated to learn everything I can in a short amount of time. The independent research project has provided a great vehicle for me to draw connections between all the themes I learned in my seminar course about poverty, race in Chicago, gentrification and resource distribution with my internship experience in the field of education. My project was a great culmination of how I’ve grown and how my understanding of social systems has become so multi-dimensional.
I think without my Chicago Center experience I wouldn’t have the goals and direction I now do. It’s helped me realize that I really do want to be a teacher, not in the suburbs where everybody has the same background as me, but rather in an urban environment where I can learn as much from the students as they can from me. Because in all honesty, that’s where most of my learning took place this semester. I don’t think I would have such a clear understanding of how much poverty, family, resources and the entire organizational structure of the city affect education and in turn the quality of life in certain communities without spending a semester wholly invested in Austin.
I can’t thank you enough for providing me with the opportunity to see, touch, hear and feel the City. This experience far surpasses any other of my life. But now, I have to return to the little bubble of my private, liberal arts school and wait for an opportunity to come back out here and further my learning once again. All I can say is that it is going to be a long year and a half.”
We’d like to thank Dave for telling us about his experience and letting us share it with our potential students and alumni! For more information on the program Dave took part in, and other similar Chicago internship programs, check out our Student Programs page. For more information on just some of the internships our students have worked in, see our Internships page. Whatever the area of focus is in your studies, we can find an appropriate internship to enhance your education.