This has been one of the longest weeks of my life, but I mean that in the best way possible. I can't believe that only 7 short days ago I was literally shivering I was so nervous about orientation and starting my internship. This week has gone even better than I imagined it. I love Chicago, I found great roommates and a place to live, and now it's up to me to pack as much living, exploring, and learning as I can into the next 3 months.
This blog post is difficult for me to write because so much happened during my orientation week. It's pretty much impossible to sum up all my initial experiences here, but I'll try and go over some of the highlights:
I found roommates! (Whoah, breathing a sigh of relief)
I knew going into Chicago Semester (CS) that my #1 priority would be to find roommates. And quick. I think we were given about 24 hours total to find roommates. It seemed like an impossible task, but CS is set up really well so that each student has the opportunity to meet a lot of other people in a really short amount of time. I was really nervous the first night because I didn't have any idea who I was going to live with, but by the next morning I had two roommates and an apartment. Not bad.
I have a place to live
Once again, CS took really good care of all of the students and everyone was able to find an apartment within the first two days. As you can see in the pictures above, our one bedroom apartment is pretty small, but I live about two blocks away from Michigan Ave (Chicago's main shopping district). The neighborhood is really great and it's been fun setting up house and exploring the area.
Work
I'm working at a hospital on the west side which serves a mainly low income minority population. My supervisor, Lisa, is the director of the Maternal and Child Health branch. I think at some point I'll put statistics up here from the neighborhood where the health center is located because they will just disturb you! The clinic was developed specifically because the standard of health was one of the worst in the entire Chicago area. Factors such as infant mortality and lead poisoning are more than double the national average and many pregnant women do not obtain appropriate health care during their pregnancy.
I was interested in this site mainly because I knew it would give me the opportunity to work in a few different settings. My schedule is a little hectic because I will be working at 3 branches of the health clinic. My schedule looks like this:
Mon/Tues: Spend the day at the large clinic shadowing a high risk health worker and a midwife
Thurs: Work at the main office with Lisa, work on a research project with the MSW interns, and update resource list
Friday: Work at the High School with an MSW intern who provides preganancy and STD/AIDS tests, counseling services, and referrals to other services.
I spent my first two days just getting oriented to the different offices and clinics. I met about 60 staff people and was thoroughly overwhelmed by the end of the day on Friday. The real work starts this week when I actually get to interact with clients, attend meetings, and start some of my big projects. I'll have a lot more detailed explanation of my internship this week, so stay tuned.
**On a side note, I know this post is somewhat vague because I didn't use the actual name of my internship site. I'm not exactly sure the rules of confidentiality on this one, so just to be safe I won't talk about specifics for now…
See you next week.
Beth
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