cm87's blog

It’s so strange that I only have four weeks left of my internship. It seems like I was just getting started, and now it’s going to be over before I know it. Where did the time in the middle go? Every week has gotten easier, as I learn the ropes of writing proposals. I’ve really come to appreciate the amount of work that goes into writing a short, simple-sounding document.

This week, my supervisor asked me to tell her what I liked/disliked about my internship. She told me she needs my input to know how to improve it and what to change, and that I should be honest and not worry about hurting her feelings. It was kind of intimidating to give feedback to someone you’re used to receiving feedback from. Feedback is difficult enough, what with trying not to hurt someone’s feelings, but when it was to someone who supervises me, and will be critiquing my work, I really didn’t want to offend her.

Part of my internship includes writing for the organization’s blog every week. It’s really hard to come up with something new that people actually might want to read, especially when not much is happening at the organization.

I’m finishing up the organization description and the project description, the two main parts of the letter of inquiry for the Mott grant. I proofread and changed them a million times before I finally had to stop. That’s the thing about writing… it’s never perfect. There are always improvements you could make or ways to re-word something so it sounds just a little bit better. I have to realize that something I write is never going to be perfect, and work on determining when it’s good enough. That’s what’s hard… figuring out what’s good enough.

I am feeling much more accomplished this week, as I’ve started writing a grant inquiry letter. For me, its easier to just starting writing something than to wade through all the preliminary work. Too much preparation stresses me out, because I don’t know how things are going to go. I start worrying about the “What ifs?” Once I get started on something, it’s usually not as hard as I thought it would be, and actually doing it builds my confidence.

This is week two of taking over where the other intern left off on her grants. As promised, my workload hasn’t increased. It hasn’t decreased, but I feel that the stress level has. The work wasn’t too stressful before, but, like I mentioned last week, Federal government grants are a little scary to a first time grant-writer. We’ve decided to switch the focus right now to grants from organizations like the Charles Mott Foundation or the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

This week I found out that the other intern at the company is ending her internship because she was too busy. Her primary responsibility was to deal with state and local grants, while mine was to do the federal grants. This change means that I’ll be working on some state or local grants now.

Since this is my first blog entry, I’ll describe a little bit about my internship. I am interning with the KEEP Foundation, a non-profit organization that raises money for scholarships. The scholarships are awarded to KEEP Foundation members to pay off their student loans after they graduate. Membership is free, but helping out at fund-raising events throughout the year is required of members.