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Intern, Service Trips Planning Team
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Adding insulation to the floor
This semester I have had the opportunity to serve as an Intern with the All Service Trips Planning Team as part of the Office of Student Activities. I was charged with assisting in the development and implementation of the 2011 Alternative Spring Break program as well as the Day Away Service trips. I met weekly with the committee members to discuss the semester initiatives, I met separately with just the Alternative Spring Break planning committee, and I attended Student Activities unit meetings as relevant to our service.
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Laying a new floor
Specifically related to the Alternative Spring Break Program and in conjunction with the planning team, my responsibilities as a professional staff member focused mainly around assisting in the development of the educational components of our trip and the development, facilitation, and participation in reflection activities for our 15 undergraduate participants during the week. For our service week we worked with the Appalachia Service Project in Brenton, West Virginia. Our education, projects, and reflections revolved around issues of poverty and specifically the differences between rural and urban poverty. This was a very different experience for me being that I have lived in large cities for a majority of my life and had never experienced the difference of rural poverty.
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Mother of the Family we served
I gained a great deal of insight as this trip developed; when I had opportunities to personally reflect on the experiences I was participating in, I found myself referring back to my experiences from my undegraduate career. Although programmatically Alternative Break Trips can be similar, the execution of the trips can vastly alter their outcomes such as whether or not to include professional staff members in the trips or simply allow the student leaders to execute the trip in it's entirety. We experienced some setbacks and challenges that were beyond our control, mostly due to weather, but in coordinating our reunion meeting, we intentionally chose our reflection activities to allow us to reconnect to eachother and to our experiences with the families and projects during the trip. Overall, Alternative Spring Break was a very educational experience for me and I am grateful for the opportunity to have been a participant and facilitator on this service trip.