Internship [part 1]

Let me tell you about an event in my life recently that has passed much sooner than I had hoped.

I wanted to do something this summer that was some form of work, that would get me out of the house. Ideally I wanted to get a job to earn some extra cash but because of my visa I can't do any paid work. I can do 'cash-in-hand' jobs such as babysitting but it's pretty unlikely to find work in that area. Believe me I tried, I stuck up flyers all around where my old host family lived and nothing came of it.

I was reading online about how many ex-seniors do summer internships in their summer break before starting college to get some extra experience to help them with college and getting jobs later on in life. Usually with internships you work for free or sometimes you may get paid a very small wage. So I thought that would be perfect to do in my summer holidays as I needed some sort of work I could do because I didn't want to feel purposeless or bored. Plus I thought it would be great to experience a real work environment as when I got back to Australia I'm going to have to apply for a part-time job.

My previous host sister actually works as a news anchor on the local morning news show as part of the KCOY news station and my old host mom had suggested maybe I could  do an internship there during the summer and although we talked to my host sister about it nothing ever came of it. Then after moving to my current host family and when I revisited the idea of interning I decided that just because I no longer had a contact within the company didn't mean I couldn't try to look into it myself. So I found the KCOY website and sent a message to one of the contact emails listed on the site. Honestly, I doubted I would get a response but I did. I had a reply from the evening news anchor! We arranged a meeting where he told me I would be job shadowing. Basically it's just a simpler version of an internship. Apparently I had missed the deadline to apply for internships so I was fortunate that they were still trying to accommodate me. I think perhaps with an internship there you would have been paid. The news anchor, Arturo told me that I would be helping with various things such as editing, writing news articles, working the cameras and the teleprompter.

I'll let you know how it all went down once I started working there in my next post- Internship [part 2].

Graduation 2.0

It is now officially summer holidays in America which seems really weird as back in Australia it's winter and they're all still stuck in school. The last day of school went really well as I got to attend graduation with all the seniors along with the other two foreign exchange girls at the school. It felt much more like I was graduating(compared to my graduation in Australia) due to the whole cap and gown ensemble plus I got to wear a pin from doing choir for the semester and us three foriegn dudettes got to wear silver 'honors' cords for getting a good GPA which we were all very proud of. Before all the seniors gathered and got lined up in the gym we had time to spare to say farewell to our teachers.

 

Me, our drama teacher and Ngan

Our attempts at gang signs...

 I took a drama class this year with the vietnamese foreign exchange student, Ngan so we went into the class and said our final goodbyes to our teacher, Ms Calvert and our class. It was so nice to get such a warm welcome from everyone- we could tell the class had really enjoyed having us that year and that really made my day more than anything. All the seniors then lined up in pairs, with all the girls being given roses to carry with them. All the foreign exchange students got to line up near the front of the queue(<--- apparently some americans don't know what this word means....), there was only four of us though; Ngan paired up with the guy from Finland and I went with my exchange sister, Hannah(who's from Austria). As we walked over to the outdoor stadium, I was paranoid my cap was going to fall off- even though I'd anchored it down with various bobby pins. Just my luck it blew off as everyone was walking in the big long line. After I'd put it back on some guy further back was yelling "Someone lost their tassle! Someone's not gonna graduate!". I soon realised it was my tassle and ran back to grab it, holding onto my cap to make sure it didn't fly off a second time. It was somewhat embarrassing as everyone was laughing as I was running back to try and find my place again in the line.

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The ceremony was amazing, people in the stands made signs to congratulate their kid and there were noise makers, confetti, streamers and even a condom someone had blown up. The seniors also snuck in beach balls and were hitting them around. Although whenever the wind carried one out of the seating area for the seniors the security guards would take them away but then 5 minutes later you'd see another one being hit around. My host mom said that when her daughter graduated there were all these blow up penises being bounced around and that the staff were madly trying to gather them all up- I would have killed to see that!

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Then at the end of the ceremony all the seniors swapped their tassle from the right to the left side of their cap and threw them in their air. It really is like the movies. Although my cap didn't go very high when I threw it so I tried a second time to no avail but gosh darn it was amazing all the same! After the ceremony, we walked out onto the baseball field where everyone was greeted by their families and heaps of balloons. Lots of photos were taken. We took lots of mid-air photos but it seemed my feet were always on the ground in all of them!

I must admit, my second high school graduation definitely topped my first- it was a lot more entertaining.

Now I just have to tackle summer....you'll see what I mean in my forthcoming posts.