Internship Week 3; Blog 1 out of 2

You are half-way through your project. How is it going? What challenges have you faced? What have you learned? What are you doing to ensure a successful completion of your internship project.

My internship is going very well. I've faced a technical challenge with excel involving the creation of charts because excel decides how it will display the information for me and I can't do anything about it, that gets frustrating. Another challenge I faced was recording my interview. The first time I did it, I realized that I didn't press start about halfway into the interview, then when I did press start, it only recorded one minutes worth of our conversation. It was pretty sucky, but now that I have more information about my mentor I can write more insightful questions. I've learned a bunch. Everyone uses jargon so I'm always asking questions, and interacting with all of the different people in my work environment gives me an insight to so many different parts of not only the DPR but the Resources Conservation Division(I work more closely with them). For example when I went out on the field with Maryanne, she told me about all of the conflicting companies such as Otay Water District who owns a patch of grass in Sunnyside where there is no sidewalk for the community to safely walk on, but still the Otay Water District isn't very easy on giving it up. I learned about GIS where they can plan trails using their special devices...everyones main objective is to get communities more involved with the environment and to preserve endangered local species. Lately to ensure the success of my project (designing the skeleton for the MSCP Annual Report2010) I have been sending out reminders to DPR/DPLU employees about the information they are supposed to get to me by the 21st. Everyone is pretty great about that, they follow up with me very quickly and when they do respond with information and I have questions they discuss things with me freely and treat me like an actual person which is great. My dad kept saying they were going to treat me like the hamster and make me go around and do minuscule tasks, but I've actually been doing some pretty intriguing stuff.