Presentations on Experiential Learning

The fall has brought the chance for me to present to a wide variety of communities on my internship experiences that I have had since starting at Wooster.  Some of you may have read my blog posts about my internship at Adelante Mujeres this past summer- what you may not know is that I was funded to do this internship by Wooster’s Lilly Project for Vocational Exploration, which is now part of the APEX Fellows program.  This included a competitive application process, and once I was accepted, a number of responsibilities came with getting funding for the internship.  These included pre-internship orientation sessions, reflection reports while completing the internship, and a post-internship paper and re-integration sessions.  One additional post-internship requirement is giving a presentation on campus.

Part of our post-internship requirements include creating a
photo journal (shown here) and a formal presentation.

Instead of just doing one presentation, so far I have been asked to do four presentations about my Adelante Mujeres experience.  These include the local church’s vegan dinner, the Environmental Studies department’s bi-monthly lunch session, an event for the college’s Board of Trustees, and the class of 1963’s reunion committee meeting.  Not only did this give me a chance to practice presenting, but it gave me a chance to reflect upon my internship with Adelante Mujeres and how it fit in with my previous summer internships.

In 2010, I was one of Wooster’s first two urban agriculture interns with Green Corps in Cleveland, Ohio.  Here I learned sustainable agriculture techniques.  This internship really shaped the rest of my Wooster education and choices in major, classes, and extracurriculars.  (See some posts that I wrote for Wooster's sustainability blog about Green Corps here and here.)

In 2011, I learned a lot about social justice with Wooster’s Global Social Entrepreneurship (GSE) Program (this is when this blog started).  Here I learned cross-cultural communication skills, project management, and how to multi-task, among other things.

I took the skills from Green Corps and GSE, as well as the passions for sustainable agriculture and social justice that I had developed, with me into my Adelante Mujeres experience.  I refined and expanded these skills, as well as learned new things about my community.  Telling this story to others has been a significant part of my fall at Wooster thus far.