Keene McCully

February 28, 2008

Internship Letter

For my internship I chose to work at Cybermill Technology Center, which is an after school education center that teachers young kids about computers and digital media. It is located in Napa on 3299 Claremont Way- Suite 4. Anyone from the ages of 8-18 years of age can attend this private, non-profit organization, even if they have no knowledge of computers. My job was to watch over the students, help them with homework or the workshop that would be running that day, keep them on task, and pretty much made sure that they did what they were supposed to do. My “boss” that hired me was Lacey Haslam who is the program director and site coordinator. I reported to Paul Hippauf who is the technology director of Cybermill about any difficulties or troubles that were going on. While there I also worked with several fellow classmates from New Tech and other volunteers who would come in and help. At Cybermill there is a lot of collaboration that goes on between the teachers, interns, other volunteers, parents, and students that attend there.

Technology Literacy and oral communication are two more big learning outcomes that are highly recommended for Cybermill since they are like New Technology High with all the computers, printers, projectors, etc. I learned that with some students, you have to be really patient since they can be slow learners, so I learned how the teachers feel sometimes. While at Cybermill, I used many computers, projectors, printers, scanners, and digital cameras. They even have there own little recording studio where the kids can make some homemade movies or soundtracks for there projects. So everything that New Tech has I used while at Cybermill. I think that the internship program is a very well thought out and stable program that is extremely useful to students on how the business world works and acts. It is nice because you get help from your internship coordinator and you get to choose where you would like to intern at, you are given many possibilities so you are sure to find the one that suits you.

I believe that my internship was challenging to a certain extent, it was pretty easy because we just had to guide the kids and watch over them, but when they got rowdy and hyper, and it was really a challenge to get them to listen to you and to calm them down. Sometimes it took two or more for use to get a student to calm down but afterwards it would be fine. We were allowed to use our own initiative to help guide them and keep them under control, but there were times when we had to go get Paul or Lacy because we just couldn’t get them to listen to us. I would recommend this internship to anyone because it’s a great learning environment, you get to meet and work with awesome people who are willing to help and teach you step by step. I’m not sure how this internship would affect my career goals, since its not going in the direction I would like to go down. Since I am interested in digital art like Photoshop, it was a good learning experience because I got to teach kids how to use it, but other then that, no it has not affected my career goals at all.