By ALANNA KAISER

With the start of the new year came the beginning of my second semester as a CGS intern! After a positive experience last semester, I chose to return to the Center for the duration of the school year. Now that I know what I’m doing and have become a master at answering emails in less than 24 hours (usually…), I’m hoping to spend this semester doing CGS tasks as efficiently as possible, and to hopefully get more exposure to global environmental topics, since that, after all, is my major area of interest.

Even though we’re only a short while into the 2015 spring semester, CGS already has their hands full. We’ve kicked off this semester’s brown bag lectures, have helped out with various comparative literature luncheons, and even hosted a few graduate student presentations. Unfortunately, unlike last semester when I was living the good life with a very open class schedule, this semester has me toiling away in classes at all hours of the day (Seriously, 9am-9pm on some days…) so I don’t have the opportunity to attend many of the lunch hour events that I would like to. My weekdays definitely lack the hearty dose of CGS that they had last semester.

However, all hope is not lost! CGS does have programs exclusive to the spring semester that occur out of the traditional nine-to-five time spectrum. Among these events is the World Stories Alive series. CGS, in partnership with the Schlow Center Region Library and Global Connections, runs World Stories Alive almost every Saturday morning at 11am at the Schlow Library. During these events, short children’s stories and nursery rhymes are told in different world languages, including French, Arabic, Chinese, Turkish, Romanian, and Spanish to name a few. After the stories and songs are over, the kids and their families get to make a craft connected to the story or the culture of whichever language is being focused on during that week. For parents, it’s a great way to start building a global perspective in their kids early, or to practice a language that may be connected to their heritage but rarely or never spoken at home. For kids, it’s a fun way to spend a Saturday morning, singing and making crafts to take home. For us interns, it’s a great way to get our fix of cute little kids making crafts and singing songs. Any way you frame it, World Stories Alive is a great series of programs.

As this semester progresses, I’ll hopefully be helping out with many more CGS events, in addition to assisting with the publications and paperwork that come out of the Center. First on my list to tackle is assisting with the possible formation of a lesson plan for a film that will be screened as part of the College Town Film Festival. This film, “Broken Landscape: Confronting India’s Water-Energy Choke Point“, is a great bridge between the global focus of CGS and my environmental interests. With any luck, us interns will produce a worth-while lesson plan for middle and high school students exploring the topics of coal extraction and the local environmental, economic, and health effects in one region of India.

With that in mind, I better get to work! Stay tuned for updates from myself and the rest of the semester’s CGS interns, and check out a complete list of CGS events here.

By  BEN MECK

Hello, again! As my final semester gets rolling it looks like I won’t have much time to rest and play video games. So far this semester it has been interesting to say the least. In the beginning of this semester I had to finish up clubs for one of our fellow interns that moved on this semester; meaning I had to teach small children. Please keep in mind, the only experience in this field I have is maintaining the peace when I see my little cousin and nieces, so a classroom full of them was challenging to say the least. However, I pushed through, taught them some origami and had them the color and the world kept spinning round.

I have also been more active with the CGS this semester as well. I’ve been tasked with putting together a career event, taking pictures at events, as well as helping with our World Stories events on Saturday mornings. Needless to say by the end of this semester I will be the king of crafts (not only did we do crafts at the elementary school there is a craft portion at the Saturday events as well). I’m still doing similar things as last semester, helping with our Brown Bag lectures on Wednesdays, making posters and other various tasks that come up. I must say I enjoy the fact that it isn’t always the same! I am really looking forward to the International Affairs talks that are coming up (look it up on our webpage if you are curious), there is a talk on terrorism and that is just right down my alley being a Security and Risk Analysis major and all.

We also have two new interns with us this round; Bridget and Leah. Both of them seem very capable and are very nice. Bridget is our new media person which I am very thankful for seeing how I don’t use social media that much and that just makes my life a little easier! Leah will be doing the same things that me and Alanna already do, helping with events and making posters and the like.

Overall I think this will be a good semester. There’s some exciting events that are coming up that will give me plenty to do so that has got me pretty pumped and I can’t wait for the lecture I mentioned earlier.

Adios until next month!

By LEAH BADER

Planning things out logically step by step, down to a tee is kind of what I do. Most of the time I make things overly stressful for myself by attempting to figure out exactly what the next 5 years of my life will look like on a day-to-day basis. So when I realized that I would be away for 5 weeks this summer researching with a professor, I started to freak out about gaining internship experience. As a sophomore, I definitely have time to “get my stuff together”, but I wanted at least some experience before this year ended.

With this in mind, I applied for the Center of Global Studies internship over the summer with no idea what to expect. I’ve done office tasks before, but had no idea what projects I would be completing as an intern. Turns out, it’s not quite as scary as I was expecting.

As an Anthropology major who enjoys studying other cultures, I was happy to come on board for the Center of Global Studies. I knew my interest in international development and experience from the Humanitarian Engineering & Social Entrepreneurship (HESE) program here at Penn State, as well as from being Co-President of the Global Public Health Brigades would allow me to enjoy at least part of my internship.

While we are writing blogs and news letters, hanging flyers, creating handouts, and other seemingly menial internship tasks, a lot of what we work on and what we make is seen by numerous people on campus – something I like to take some pride in (even though I haven’t exactly been here that long). The events that we hold are rich in culture and interesting areas of study, making attending them as an intern not as much of a chore as imagined. I like the fact that I can incorporate learning about other cultures into my internship and connect it back to my major.

While Sarah has definitely been taking it easy on me so far, I can’t wait to jump in and get involved even more.