Thank You but Not Goodbye

Hi Amanda,

            I wanted to write you a genuine thank you letter to conclude my internship but this thank you extends far beyond my internship. When I first got the chance to really get to know you I was in a pretty rough place in my life and things just weren’t going that well for me. Honestly I wanted to quit college, it wasn’t that I was a bad student but I wasn’t motivated. If I’m honest I just wasn’t getting the university experience that I wanted. That was about two years ago now. You needed help with ASU101 and for some reason the opportunity to teach a class called to me. As I went through that semester it pulled me out of that dark slump I was in and by the end I was hired on as your student worker. I stayed around and helped with the online section of ASU101 in the Spring and it was fun but I loved teaching in person so much more. So when summer came and you were busy with Yali we agreed I would take on ASU101. Now I know only because you told me that you wish you could have given me more guidance but you were busy and I managed in the end I hope you are satisfied with what I delivered initially. As much as I loved teaching ASU101 I never knew how much my students appreciated me or how much I meant to them in shaping some of their college decisions until the Passport event in Tempe for the student organizations. I went to it for my brother who is a freshman and as I was walking back to grab the shuttle to take it home I was talking about my Mustang and out of the shadows a guy said my name. He was a student from my first class, honestly my favorite student because he took the troublemaker of my class in as a friend and straightened him out. I felt bad for him as that class was wrapping up because he was unsure how to pay for school. He recalled something I said to my class about getting creative and not giving up when the cards seem stacked against you. He ran with it and found a fulltime job with parking and now gets the tuition waiver. Turns out I help with retention too LOL. Taking on this internship was an honor and in that time my position in the college has grown and you were a part of that. So for everything and everything that’s still to come, thank you!

Sincerely,

Anthony

My Final Reflection

Looking back I think that my overall experience with the internship was positive. As I reflect back on my original goals I feel that I accomplished them. I was a little hard in my final evaluation of myself however the peer instructors enjoyed the curriculum I set up for the class. I think the most important thing that I learned is that working in hired education requires a level of patience and flexibility that is different from the traditional work place. That is to say that the faculty and staff in the university where so many different hats and fulfill so many different roles that it’s important to be understanding of that fact. I also took away that this is where I want to be. Obviously I want to do more than teach ASU101 but I know I want to work in higher education. I look forward to graduate school and I can’t wait for my next journey in chasing down a PhD. I know that being a professor is a busy and rigorous lifestyle but I also believe it is one that suits me best. I can’t do a traditional nine to five it’s just me. I look forward to reading the final thoughts of my peer’s internships and want to wish everyone the best of luck in their future endeavors.

End of Semester Scrammble

As the semester is winding down and I have been balancing fulltime work, a 19 credit semester, 2 honors projects, 2 ASU101 sections that I teach, and a 60 pound puppy with too much energy I am finding that time is a resource I just don’t have enough of. The madness of senior year was not something I was expecting and as we make one last mad dash to the end of the fall semester the stress and anticipation for the semester’s end is in full swing.

Prioritizing time for assignments has been the struggle of my semester. Unfortunately I feel that tonight it will be my blogs that suffer the consequence of being late. This is because I made the mistake of taking a lab science in my second to last semester and it has been giving me a run for my money. I forgot how demanding a lab science can be and I completely forgot to finish that requirement when I first transferred to ASU.

My curiosity is if anyone else has been feeling the strain of the semester and to know how you are handling the struggles you are facing.

Second Thoughs?

I wanted to use this free write to reflect on a few second thoughts maybe even regrets that I have about my experience. I wouldn’t say that they are things that will hinder my decisions in the future but I just wanted to write about them. So here goes. Did I get the right degree? I study entrepreneurship but then I asked myself is that my passion or do I enjoy being the entrepreneur. Maybe I should have gotten a degree in Industrial Design and pursued those ideas of things I wanted to create because with the advent of in-home 3D printers small scale manufacturing is possible. You know that has been a thought I’ve had for a while. My resolve is this. Finish my current journey, go to grad school, and start my career. Industrial Design is my passion and the technology will only get better with time. So when I have a job as a professor I will tap into my tuition waiver and learn a new trade, after that who knows because I really only want to learn design to compliment my hobby of restoring Mustangs (the car by Ford).

Second Career Services Experience

My second career services experience was learning about the Go Government webinars that they hosted although I wasn’t able to view the complete series I was able to talk with other students about them and I found it to be very interesting. I am striving to become a professor at a major research university. But the series intrigued me because I have never considered what my knowledge and experience could get me in a federal position.

I later did some more research on the subject particularly and saw that most of what I would want to do involved consulting and negotiating service contracts with various private and nonprofit organizations. I found the proposition to be exciting. I also learned how different creating a resume for a federal job is.

Organizational Strengths

I suppose my organization has several strengths depending on which aspect you look at it from. Leadership at both the university and college level beneath it would be one of the very first things I would pull from. In my opinion Michael Crow is a very unique asset to the institution. I truly believe that he brings a vision that is like no other in higher education. To ensure that his vision succeeds he surrounds him self by experts in their respective fields. In a sense this benefits our college because many of those within the leadership hierarchy that President Crow has created come from the College of Public Service & Community Solutions.

Now if I could change something about my organization there are two specific things I would change. I first made the observations these changes as a student worker where that carried forward as an intern and even as a member of the university staff. They are accountability and productivity metrics. I’m not at liberty to go into detail about the changes however in regards to productivity and accountability I will say that my experience in the private sector may have formed my expectations for work place performance.

Making My Class Worthwhile

Every time I step in front of the room to lead my ASU101 sections I make it a point to ensure that my students are getting something from the material we are covering. Whether it is showing my students faster ways to search the electronic library for research papers or emphasizing the importance of the resources they have available to them I always make sure I’m connecting with my class regardless of how much they like or dislike the course content.

One thing that I have done every semester in every section of the class was to take a few minutes with them on at the end of the very last class to have a “heart to Heart” so to speak with my freshmen. I just simply tell them that the road they have ahead of them is going to be long and stressful. There are going to be moments when they want to quit. They are going to question their decisions and will feel uncertain around many corners.

Then I tell them that I am going to share a video. It is an abridged version of the commencement speak given to the graduating class of the University of Southern California by Arnold Schwarzenegger the spring before his daughter started her freshman year. I tell my class that although his speech was given to a graduating class the lessons he shares will help them when they feel lost.

The video is below, please take a moment to watch it.

How does your organization demonstrate public service and/or urban governance?

I found that where I decided to intern was very unique because it has both the ability to demonstrate public service and urban governing. Arizona State University is a public research institution and the College of Public Service & Community Solutions is the specific area of the university that I would like to focus this blog’s attention towards.

The College of Public Service & Community Solutions demonstrates public service in several ways. One of the most obvious would have to be in its ability to produce quality graduates who seek to serve the public good. Another way that the college demonstrates public service is through the amount of solutions based research that its faculty and research centers produce for public and nonprofit organizations as well as private organizations that are mission based.

Urban governance is also demonstrated regularly by the College of Public Service & Community Solutions. This comes in several iterations of the strategic partnerships that the college, schools, centers, and faculty cultivate to either enhance the knowledge enterprise that is Arizona State University or to provide opportunities for its students. Several examples of this would include the work of the Morrison Institute, the Lodestar Center, or the Center Organization Research & Design which I am affiliated with as an undergraduate research assistant.

These are just several examples of how Arizona State University and the College of Public Service & Community Solutions demonstrate both public service and urban governance in the community. Being able to engage in the initiatives of the university has been both an honor and a privilege.

I don't want to teach ASU101 again!

I really wanted to use this blog to reflect on a decision I’ve been weighing in on for some time. For the past two years I have volunteered happily serving as an instructor for ASU101. I even seized the opportunity to coordinate the effort as my internship. But I really feel that it is time to move to the next step and to learn some more skills in the art of teaching. I feel that as an ASU101 instructor there is no importance in the class through the views and opinions of many people in the university whether it be faculty members or the students.

As a result I am contemplating the opportunities I could gain by becoming a Graduate Teaching Assistant. I say this because teaching ASU101 has become somewhat of a mundane task for me because I’m not really teaching content but rather facilitating a discussion module. As a TA I feel that because I’ll get to work with a professor that is teaching a class that is content of practicum rich I will be able to get a larger grasp of how to prepare powerful lectures and thoughtful course content that will help the students in their future endeavors.

When you're in Barrett the struggle is real!

I think that my favorite challenges this semester are coming from both of the honors projects that I have to complete this semester as a graduation requirement for Barrett. The first on I am working on is a proposal studying the success of university entrepreneurship initiatives for PAF484. The other honors project is analyzing and discussing the political spectacle that is Vladimir Putin and reporting on it based on the readings of my public service ethics class PAF460. Both projects are entirely different yet both are intriguing.

PAF484 requires me to learn a slightly new task. As I am familiar with setting up a research project I am not familiar with proposing one so the challenge is in learning that skill as it will play an invaluable role in the future career I seek to achieve. PAF460 is more of a traditional report style paper but it has a fun twist because I am choosing to write the paper in a very satirical form because I want it to be humorous. Not to poke fun at Mr. Putin but to mock how the media skews the truth of political language to create their own political truth that is fed to the public.

My first publication is official!

I thought that this would be an appropriate opportunity to announce that my first publication is officially available. I received a copy of the textbook that the chapter I co-authored with Prof. Gordon Shockley is available. The book is entitled A Concise Guide to Entrepreneurship, Technology, and Innovation. It is a great resource that provides good oversight of how entrepreneurship in commercial, social, and policy-based applications have deep impact over innovation. It also explains the role of technology, specifically tech-transfer and how it effects innovation. Our contribution is a brief chapter giving some insight into the definition of social entrepreneurship as well as giving some context through examples of real life social entrepreneurs and the work that they do.

When I think back and reflect about the process I distinctly remember how overwhelmed I was. Not at what I was asked to write because I felt relatively comfortable in that aspect but the manner by which I had to write. This was my first publication and at the time I was still a junior, I was asked to contribute to a textbook chapter. Academic writing is a bit more advanced than what I have been accustomed to so I was initially doubtful of what I was going to produce. I remember the exact moment when I found my inspiration and created a framework to base my section of the chapter. I was eating at a Taco Bell and I did my prewriting on a napkin. All in all I feel that my contribution flowed seamlessly with what Prof. Shockley wrote and I was happy with my final result.

The best part is that my Barrett thesis which will be a literature review covering the scholarly journal articles about social entrepreneurship may become my second publication with the help of Prof. Shockley if all goes well. So I wanted to thank Prof. Christopher Hayter for presenting such an awesome opportunity to me. As well as Prof. Gordon Shockley who has really allowed me to develop in this particular area of research.

The Application of Leadership

With my internship leadership is a daily occurrence that comes in many different forms and has been encouraged by those I’ve worked with throughout my time with the project. Leadership has two primary roles that stand out more than others. The biggest leadership role that I took on was in the development and deployment of the curriculum for ASU 101. After that my leadership in the classroom as an instructor of two ASU 101 sections takes a good portion.

My favorite leadership exercise in my internship has to be the experiences I’ve gained doing project management over the design of the curriculum. It has been interesting because it has tested my skills in a completely unique way because it is the first time in a long time that I had to use my management skills for something other than sales quotas or balancing budgets and other various business related operations. What I enjoyed most was the amount of trust that my supervisors gave me throughout my internship.

Insight From My Mentor

I wanted to share a dialog that I was able to have with Prof. Gordon Shockley regarding his career, how he got there, and his advice to me as I endeavor to become a professor. From what I was able to understand becoming a professor was a natural evolution for him he started as and undergrad and then went on to receive an MBA with a nonprofit concentration. After working in the for profit sector he was afforded the opportunity to enter a doctoral program. He seemed to have chosen this career for the level of satisfaction it brought him. I have to agree that academia does bring a high level of satisfaction to my life as opposed to my career in telecom.

Over the time that I’ve known Prof. Shockley his advice to me has always been to focus on the stage of the game that I’m in and no worry so much about what is to come. Honestly, as life has happened and I’ve moved into my senior year I realized that his point was all too true. I found that I needed to focus back on being a student and complete the tasks at hand especially considering how much busier my life got working full time for the university. The other advice he gave me was that although I need to have a discipline that my research focuses on I shouldn’t worry too much about that early on because I will have time in grad school to figure it out.

The reason why I am interested in becoming a professor specifically in social entrepreneurship is because of the amount of satisfaction I get from working in an institute of higher education that is research driven. I’ve had opportunities to teach classes, write a publication, engage in research, and much more. I’m hooked! It provides me a level of work life balance that I’ve never had and I am grateful for the opportunities I have been given. As a result this is something I hope to give forward in the future.

We are almost done!

With every passing week we get closer and closer to graduation. It's hard to explain but I'm almost in a state of disbelief. I think that for most of us college has been a crazy journey and each of us has a unique story to share. For me that story is about unfinished business and basically to stick it to my fifth grade social studies teacher who told me in front of my class that I wasn't cut out for college. I say this because it had a profound effect on me in fact my entire high school experience was based around learning a vocation. It just makes me wonder how often things like that happen in classrooms. I remember after high school becoming an automotive technician and hating it. I love cars as a hobby I've own 30 and absolutely love building and restoring Mustangs. But because it was a hobby I couldn't do it for work. So I got into sales management but after that career burnt me out I was left in a rut, not knowing what I wanted to do. I had a desire for college so I did it but now that I'm almost done I'm in disbelief.

Career Services

I decided that for my career services experience I was going to get my resume updated. I admit that I did so for two reasons. The first reason being that I have very limited access to school resources because of my work schedule. So making it to events or other functions can become tricky. So I decided that it would be acceptable during a lunch break to get my resume reviewed. The second reason is because career services always has the latest updates with regard to resume formatting and I annually update my resume so I took this as an opportunity to see what is trending with top resumes. Overall the experience was beneficial as my format was good but they suggested I bring more emphasis to some of my academic achievements. If you haven't updated your resume in awhile definitely check them out!

My Inability to Balance Life

One of my absolute biggest struggles is finding a good work-life balance. As a student I have to juggle a full time school load including 19 credits. I then work a full time job and teach two classes. Then there is my life at home which gets pretty boring because usually I'm so exhausted I just want to sleep. I find that for the most part it's my fault because I'm a bit overwhelmed in my senior year especially with writing my thesis for Barrett. In fact my only relief is that I'm planning a four day cruise as a graduation gift to myself! I hope grad school is different because I always hear that from people. I suppose it will be different based solely on how much I plan to slow down. But I am curious to hear about how my colleagues find balance in their lives or if we are all just running around frantically.

Getting Students Engaged

One of the challenges that seems to face anyone who teaches a class is student engagement. Now this happens at many different levels and I've yet to find anyone exempt from this. Sometimes when I teach I may have a class that has energetic students who love to participate but there always seems to be one or two hard balls. Other classes I've taught are full of students with dead eyes who refuse to participate. Those two scenarios have seemed to be my experience through college. As a student I like to engage and participate so I have a hard time putting myself in the shoes of those students. So perhaps I am throwing the question out there how do you reach those students even when you're giving it all you got because I refuse to believe they're lost causes.

A Day in the Life

My internship varied from day to day which made it very enjoyable. On any given day I would be in meetings, scheduling and organizing guest speakers, creating content for blackboard, and much more. My favorite part was the entire restructuring of the term project for ASU101. The reason I enjoyed working on that part so much is because the project transformed and took on several incarnations before it was finalized.

For those in this internship class who were ASU101 instructors in the fall of 2014 the term project was the Changemaker Challenge. Which consisted of groups of freshmen writing business proposals to Changemaker that helped to address public problems. The end results were very hit or miss. Knowing that my initial goal was to take my knowledge of social entrepreneurship and revamp the project into a college level run and organized project that was rebranded the Innovation Challenge.

From that point there was talk of a new college pedagogy and how to incorporate it into ASU101. The initial idea was to fuse the pedagogy into the innovation challenge. My biggest concern was that the project would become way too burdensome and become too large for a one credit hour class. My final solution was to scrap the all the ideas of a term project and build something new from the ground up. The new project named the Community Impact Portfolio was well received and was a collaboration between myself and the person tasked with service learning for the college.

The reason that I shared this experience in a condensed manner was to explain that I was very active in decision making processes and that a day in my internship involved a magnitude of creative and critical ways to solve problems and find solutions. 

Discretionary Balance

I decided that with this post I wanted to talk about a part of my internship that caused me to think slightly out of the box in order to deliver an outcome that everyone was satisfied with. I had lots of different things that were required to be in the curriculum for this course. There were times that because of the nature of what my supervisor was doing contact was not possible.

This led to me having to make direct decisions over how the course was going to look. I will admit that there were times when I questioned whether or not I had the authority to make some of the decisions I did but I just took charge because I had no other choice.

My biggest concern was the amount of content that the university and the college wanted in the course but also understanding that it is a one credit hour class. I felt going into this that ASU101 needed to be a resource not a burden to the students so my goal was make the class useful to them so that they didn’t feel that the course was just a stupid university requirement.

I call it discretionary balance because I was basically given a list of everything the class needed to cover and it was my job to find a balance between what was needed and not overwhelming the students. In the end I felt that I achieved what I set out to do and the positive response I had from those I reported to was very reassuring.

The Unexpected Challenge

Right from the beginning my internship had challenges that I knew I was going to face. Initially I thought the biggest challenge was going to be a matter of dealing with the bureaucracy of a public institution and the level of red tape that comes with it. What I found is that for all the hassle that does come from the extremely long chain of command approval system ASU is fairly efficient. My dad for example works for the City of Mesa and has told me how it’s nearly impossible to get things pushed through at times.

The real challenge came in two parts. First my supervisor was asked to help with the Young African Leaders Initiative that our college hosts. This made her completely inaccessible which was both good and bad. It tested a good amount of the skills I’ve built over the years. The second challenge came way of creatively implementing the college’s new pedagogy into the already existing lesson plan. I had to stay extremely dynamic and accommodating in my resolve when handling both situations.

I can't seem to get away from this place!

   So I'm going to talk about my organization and how my internship happened by chance. Before I accepted a full-time job with the university I was a student worker in the Office of the Dean for the College of Public Service & Community Solutions. I also taught a section of ASU101 in the fall of 2014 and an online section in the spring of 2015. My supervisor at the time asked if I would be interested in creating the curriculum for the course for the fall 2015 because she knows how interested I am in becoming a professor. So the conversation then became can it be used as my internship. The answer was yes and it grew from there. So when I say I can't get away from this place it is by choice.

   Arizona State University is at the cutting edge of innovation and a world class leader among higher education public research institutions. It was founded in 1885 as the Tempe Normal School and it hasn’t looked back. The University has experienced massive growth over the years and under the leadership of its current president, Michael Crow, ASU has transcended the boundaries of a traditional public university to what is referred to as a knowledge enterprise.

   Specifically I work, now full-time, and intern in the College of Public Service & Community Solutions where I support the functions of Academic & Student Affairs. Our dean, Jonathan Koppell, has led a massive transformation and advance of the mission our college delivers on. It is a very inspiring place to work and so it was a simple decision to intern here. The responsibility of my internship is to coordinate 15 sections of ASU101 for our freshman class that delivers on the expectations of both the university at large and our college.

Some Background About Me

     I just wanted to start by taking some time to introduce myself and give a little context to my goals, interests, and aspirations. My name is Anthony, I am a senior in the School of Public Affairs and I major in Public Service & Public Policy with a concentration in Nonprofit Leadership & Management. Additionally I am a student in Barrett, The Honors College and I am starting work on a Thesis/Creative Project this semester that will encompass applying sustainability and entrepreneurship to a community project.

     Working in the public sector was not my original life plan it just happened to be something that I fell in too much like the degree I am taking. My original career was in the wireless telecommunications industry where I have held a number of mid-to-top level management positions with various service providers. I’ve also owned two businesses and continue to pursue entrepreneurial endeavors primarily in property management now.

     My plan after graduating is to continue through graduate school where I plan to obtain a Master’s in Public Administration and then proceed into a Ph.D. program that focuses in Public Affairs. Research has always been something that has interested me. As an undergraduate I have been fortunate enough to gain a wealth of experience as a research affiliate with the Center for Organization Research & Design. Ultimately it led to my first publication, a book chapter about social entrepreneurship that I co-authored with Dr. Gordon Shockley. My area of research looks at the connection that entrepreneurship has across the sectors in its commercial, social, and policy based forms. I specifically focus on finding market-based solutions for massive public problems.

     For my internship I chose something to strategically fulfill a specific gap on my resume. So the goals I look to achieve during this experience are very focused. First, the most specific goal is to gain experience designing a curriculum from the ground up for an institution of higher-education. My second goal is to translate leadership skills that I have gained over my career to successfully coordinate 15 sections of a college course. My third goal is to create a positive experience for the students and instructors that is both engaging and full of powerful resources. The specific desire for these goals is to gain a breadth of higher education teaching experience.

     I believe that my internship will give me an experience that I would not be able to gain otherwise. It will also help as I transition careers into academia because after all my goal is to become a professor. I enjoyed sharing a little about myself and look forward to reflecting about my internship experience in the coming weeks.