Background

Background

Since I’ve got a long summer to recap, I figured it would be a good idea just to cover the basics of what I’m doing here in Providence and why I left home in the first place.

After many unsuccessful attempts at landing an internship or well-paid job that would look halfway decent on my résumé, and coming to the conclusion that if I am actually going to go through with creating an independent concentration (which I am), I’ll need to take classes this summer, and after realizing that I have no research experience whatsoever, I decided that I needed to come back to Providence and fill in these really important gaps in my life. So I came to Providence, pre-registered for Neuro1 and VA10, no place to live and no job to work, with about $200 to my name. It was an adventure.

I had luckily been shopping around for sublets on the Jolt, and had narrowed it down to two feasible options. It also helped that a lot of my friends were living in Providence, so at the worst I could crash on someone’s couch for a while. But my dad helped me move in at my current home—a beautifully renovated historical house near Wickenden, my favorite area of Providence—the first day of searching, and everything worked out well. My only regret is not being able to bring my car, as parking here on the hill is ridiculous.

So then I had to find a job. Classes started on Monday, and I had a few interviews lined up through the applications I had sent through the Brown job website. Being a student is amazing, because you are guaranteed to have a job on campus. Yay, work-study! The economy lately has been so terrible; I’ve heard horror stories of college grads not being able to find a job anywhere, regardless of where they’ve applied or how practical their degree may be. This terrifies me, and I hope that the recession doesn’t worsen by the time I graduate. I will most likely attend a grad school program of some sort, at the very least, by then, so hopefully the wonderful umbrella policy of belonging to a university will still apply for a few years.

In any case, I now have two jobs—the first to get back to me was working as a monitor at the gym, but the director of Athletics contacted me directly because he wants me to help design pamphlets and literature for the department, also, to publicize phys ed classes and intramurals. So I accepted the position, of course, and subsequently got a call from Facilities Management—they were interested in my application for their energy and environmental sustainability department projects intern (a mouthful, I know). I had my interview and was hired along with one other intern, David, who is quickly becoming a close friend. We work on a lot of projects together concerning composting (our major project), energy efficiency, carbon emissions reduction, and other environmentally geared topics. It’s a lot of work for only a four-person department, so I have a lot of actual, important work to do, and it’s pretty awesome. For now, I’m doing mainly publications-based work, which is the reason why they hired me, but I’ve been doing a ton of research as well. It’s a fairly fantastic situation and my summer has been great so far.