| |
Profile
of Katie Szokoly, Intern, CIDDE, University of Pittsburgh, 4/08
by Graham Thomas
PPW/Writing Center Publicity Intern
 Katie Szokoly is a Nonfiction English Writing Major with career aspirations of becoming a teacher. After taking some wonderful advice from Pam O’Brien, Katie took an internship with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Instructional Development & Education (CIDDE) where she wrote articles for Teaching Times. Teaching Times is a newsletter that is devoted to the support of teaching and learning, and is distributed to every faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh.
Since Katie aspires to be a teacher, this internship was especially rewarding because she got to interview teachers and write about their teaching strategies. So, she not only gained valuable writing experience, she learned a ton about teaching.
From the start, Katie felt pretty confident and comfortable completing her assignments, since she has written articles for previous internships. “Combining that with the fact that I mostly worked from home, I felt comfortable from the beginning,” she explains. Furthermore, her supervisor made it very clear that she was there and more than willing to help with any concerns or questions she had.
Working from home had many benefits that Katie quickly realized. Since her schedule didn’t provide huge chunks of time for her to go to an office to work, she found it much easier and practical to work on her own free time. Also, she was able to take as much time as she needed to review notes and draft articles without any of the distractions that can be present in an office setting. Katie said, “I felt much less stressed being able to complete the assignments on my own time and schedule, while still adhering to deadlines.”
The articles Katie was assigned were very routine and didn’t change much. Her usual responsibilities for each article were to contact faculty members, set up interviews, conduct the interviews, write the article, edit the article based on feedback from her supervisor, send the article to the faculty member for finalization, and make any changes the faculty member may have wanted. With so many steps going into each article, there was always something for her to do.
Katie, being an extremely motivated person, feels that unpaid internships are definitely worth it. Being that this was her fifth internship, she feels ready and confident going into post-graduation life. This internship at CIDDE was especially valuable because she learned so much about teaching and her strengths and weaknesses as a writer.
|
|