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.