observations

When I think about the process of this project in retrospect, one word comes to mind: "unsure." At the outset I was very excited about my idea that internships could be a resource for the city while at the same time connecting the city more intimately with the college. However it is always easy to be excited about ideas for in our mind they are already perfect and complete.   The problem is that at some point we must begin to make ideas reality, and at this juncture I was forced to stop and think, "Where do I go from here?"   The scholarly resources had helped give me some inkling as to where I might head, but for the most part there seemed to be relatively few in scholastica who had done extensive research on the topic. They all affirmed the benefits of internships, but few had practical advice as to the implementation of the kind of project I was looking to do.   From the beginning of the project then, I was "unsure" as to where I would end up.
     Initially, I pictured a website that was overflowing with information from dozens of different organizations and agencies, a veritable supermarket of internships. I also imagined that for each possible internship, there would be listed a full description of the position, and the student would merely go through an application process to receive the position, no Center for Experiential Learning paperwork necessary. The website I now have is obviously a little different than my idea.   Yet this disparity of idea and reality is less a failure than it is a good reflection of what has been proven typical in this sort of an internship building process.
     As the National Society for Experiential Education has shown,

The process is worth it, no matter how hard; all of those involved insisted that it would eventually pay off.
The players must be very flexible. The three different groups of universities and communities came to their successes in very different ways. In fact, the only common element they all shared was to...(Bailis 19).

My results show that the process was hard. As I began to approach different organizations with the prospect of a hundred interns beating down their door, believing I was a bearer of good gifts, I was disheartened at the responses I received from some groups. They were unsure about the amount of help an intern could actually offer, and weren't sure they wanted to open their door to the work that formulating an intern could create. I also came to understand that attempting to set internships in stone at this point in the process was a great example of being inflexible. There was no way I could predict the needs of any of these organizations for the coming years right now, nor could I predict student’s abilities to fill them. As a result of both of these realizations I decided firstly to keep my amount of posted internships small at this point, in an attempt to ensure that those that are posted represent a true need for interns, not my desire to have an impressive amount of links on my site. Second, I decided to leave my internship categories more general, so as to allow flexibility on both sides of the internship relationship people actually start using this resource next year. While at first scaling back these different sections felt like I was making concessions, yet now I believe that they were merely part of my coming to grips with reality.
While the path may have been unsure, and my ideas may have been a little lofty, I feel that the end product is definitely in line with the intentions I began with. The resources have already begun to flow in that students have already approached me about the possibility of internships next year, and relationships have already begun to grow, as there are now multiple groups in our surrounding communities that understand that St. Olaf College wants to work for them.

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In regards to improvements of this project in the time to come, there is little I can say. Obviously there is the need for a better structure to the site. As a first time web designer, I realize this is probably not the most aesthetically pleasing web project ever created. Beyond this, the only improvements I can hope for are a continual cultivation of the rapport between the organizations on the site and the college, the expansion of the amount of internships listed, and, overall, a continuation of the initial idea of bringing students and Northfield together to make a difference through collaborative service-learning.