My Internship Goals

As a biology major who enjoys mentoring and working with youth, I have chosen internships that are related to teaching sciences to youth. These internships are not only important in that they can give me experience in a career path that I am considering, but will also create challenges in which I will need to push myself to overcome. Since I came from the same neighborhoods that I have selected most of my internships to be at – where there are many underprivileged kids who relied on free summer school programs to keep themselves occupied and retain material learned during the school year – doing these internships are my way of giving back, saying thanks to the community, and to keep these public school programs running. I remember that the …show more content…
As a tutor for LANDIS’s America Reads program, I have some experience working with youth and teaching them different academic subjects. However, because it is only a part-time job where I focus on helping one student, I do not get an opportunity to interact with different types of learners. Although tutoring the same two or three students for the academic year is helpful as the consistency helps me become more accustomed to their learning style, it limits the way that I can gather enough experience as an educator. During my internship, I would be able to work in a classroom or with a larger group of students where there are many different types of learners. I would like to encounter students who force me to come up with innovative non-traditional ways of explaining concepts to them and challenge me to come up with new methods to help them retain …show more content…
I tutor for a couple of students for five hours each week. Even though I may enjoy the work and sense of accomplishment I get from each session, this is completely different from teaching a large group for 8 hours a day. Many of the students I help are those who voluntarily go to tutoring. They stay there for one to two hours until their work is done. As a teacher, this may not always be the case. I may encounter difficulties such as behavioral problems or need to deal with parents. During this internship, I hope to get advice from the teachers and other educators that I will work with on what I can do for different problems I may encounter. I want to know what made them choose this career path and whether or not there were ever moments where they wanted a different career. I hope that they give me a better perception of being a teacher besides what I already know about. I expect my mentor teacher to show me the “behind-the-scenes” of this career that prospective teachers do not know about when considering being a