February 27, 2013

I'm becoming quite accustomed to making copies and folders for CYD, but today I was introduced to a whole other aspect of the paperwork. Today, Emily showed me how to access all of the excel sheets which listed every child who had ever been enrolled in the Screen It! program over the last three years. They are called PEI Tracking Forms - and I now realize that I have no idea what the PEI stands for...Anyway, she basically just wanted me to create some new forms for the schools we had just started teaching in (Hillcrest, Widen, KIPP). These forms are so much more manageable than the huge stacks of manila folders I've been going through. Although, I've always found excel worksheets intimidating, I got familiar with these pretty quickly and I think keeping track of the hundreds of children just got a little easier!

Today I also created a new excel sheet for expenses from the education department. The director has these huge binders, for each month of the year, full of receipts and copies of checks. It was very overwhelming, but I just went through and wrote down any instance where the education department had expenditures. It gave me some insight to all that Emily has to deal with in her role as Education Director.

Additionally, I'm really glad I'm able to practice my skills with computer programs like Photoshop and the Microsoft Office Suite. I think these are skills that pretty much everyone has now, so it's a good idea to stay refreshed!



HOURS WORKED: 10am-5:30pm (7.5 hrs.)

February 20, 2013

I realized today that I am given a lot of freedom for my own creativity in my internship. Not necessarily in what goes into curriculum or outreach programs, but in my own work. What I really like about interning, so far, is that I don't have helicopter supervisors. They give me thorough directions and then just let me work alone for hours until I finish a project. When I work on CYD files, I usually start a little after ten and go all the way until about two, saving all of my questions until the end. I have realized that I'm a very good independent worker and don't require lots of supervision, which I think are some good qualities in an employee/intern. 

Other than CYD, today I worked a little on some creative projects. Delilah hand-drew masks that looked pretty identical to two of the more simple masks in the collection. It was my job to take her drawings and blow them up large enough to fit a child's face. The kids would eventually color, cut and paste the masks on a craft stick to take home. This type of activity usually takes place after a youth tour. I had a lot of fun messing with the design and finding the right fit on a page. Kind of irrelevant to the actual internship, but I am gaining a lot more experience with office machinery like scanners/copiers. I've found that they are all different and you just have to try all sorts of tricks to get them to do what you want. 

HOURS WORKED: 10am-5pm (7 hrs.)

February 13, 2013

Today I was given the task to make new folders for a few schools (Houston Elem., Widen Elem.) and I started coming up with my own way of organizing the students' folders. Mostly, I decided to sort them by school and alphabetically from the get go and used A LOT of post-its/staples/paper clips. Office supplies are my new favorite thing! Since some of the folders I had done last week were worked on by someone else in the education department, I had a hard time starting over today. For this reason, Emily has delegated CYD paperwork to me and I feel confident that I can get them reorganized!

I also had a conversation with Leticia, one of the other interns in the Education department. She is a second year graduate student at UT and is getting her Masters in Art Education, which is something I have thought of doing myself. She gave me some advice; most importantly of which was to take a year off before starting grad school. I was already fairly set on taking a break, but she said she really wished she would have. She said it was more important to get your name out into the art world and to network. She did have a lot of positives to say about UT though, so it is still in my top three of my list of graduate schools. 


HOURS WORKED: 10am-6pm (8 hrs.)

February 6, 2013

I learned a little bit more about why I was doing so much of this CYD paperwork. The Community Youth Development paperwork is a requirement of the CYD grant. A certain number of these students' families have to live in a certain area, make below a certain income, etc. These registration forms, risk factor surveys, and post-tests measure all of this. The Mexic-Arte Museum has received this grant for a number of years through the City of Austin, however, before Emily arrived to the museum at the end of last year, the paperwork was a bit of a mess. Some of the first paperwork I had been filing had been from fiscal year 2011-2012, so we were playing a bit of catch up. Knowing this, I feel more confident that what I am doing is not just busy work, but is actually playing an integral role in the museum's education outreach programs.

FYI, the CYD grant funds Screen It! which is a program in which art educators, like Delilah and Emily, go into schools elementary through high school and teach a screen printing class. Most of these classes take the place of an introductory art class or are an after school class. I think this program is interesting and unique in such an urban setting. It makes me proud to play a small role in how art is introduced in the classroom. 

HOURS WORKED: 10am-6pm (8 hrs.)