By Resaen Stoute
This semester was both good and bad due to numerous reasons. As a second year intern I now had to balance school work, my community partner, working on the Visualising Caribbean Literature project and my personal life.
I enrolled in 7 courses this semester which meant a full schedule and a lot of work. Seeing that I am majoring in both economics and hospitality, there was a great amount of things to be done. Some of my coursework included numerous tests, quizzes, assignments, groupworks, problem sets, case studies, models etc. With all this there were also some setbacks such as cancellation of classes, no internet connection and personal issues. Also, most of my classes were on campus therefore I had lots of “ups and downs” to do . To add to this, I had to spend four hours every week working on the Visualising Caribbean Literature project.
My task on the Visualising Caribbean Literature project dealt with author data sheets. Firstly, I had to separate the list into two sections; Authors who had data sheets and Authors who did not have. After this, I then fact checked the authors who had and then started working on completing those who did not have. However, while working there was an issue. The list we were working off of was not updated therefore I had to recheck to identify which authors were on that list. Another task I did was fixing all genre types for authors beginning with the letter “O”.
The next part of this semester was working with my community partner, the Dominica National Archives Unit. This unit is where all materials from the past, business court etc. are stored in hopes of preservation. To gain service learning hours, I spent six hours a week at the unit working on data entries for audio and video cassettes. Most days I entered approximately three boxes of information onto the system whereas other days my entries were a bit fewer. However, starting this project was not easy as there were quite a bit of technical difficulties, thankfully the issue was resolved in the following days. Secondly, I had to complete two hours three times a week and this was very hectic seeing that i had classes both before and after those free two hours. Then, the site crashed so all the work I entered was deleted and I had to re enter everything. That was very frustrating seeing that I could have been working on another box. Lastly, this place was very very cold and seeing that I was coming from the sun and sitting in this cold environment for two hours, I felt sick on numerous occasions and this was not really the best working environment for me. I both enjoyed and did not enjoy this experience due to numerous reasons. I enjoyed this seeing that all I had to do was sit by myself and do the work. On the other hand I did not enjoy this because there were several instances of miscommunication and issues that were uncalled for which made me want to stop, however, I kept it together and returned.