Jake Hinds
My experiences with OC
When I first agreed to become an intern for OC I had no idea what to expect. All I wanted was a quick way to make some money, but I soon realized it was much more than just that. Around March, our schools superintendent came to me and a few of my friends. She told us about the program and how it worked. Some of the kids said they didn’t want to, or they already had a summer job. But the program immediately caught my eye, and within a few months I was an intern! Around the beginning of June, my fellow interns and I sat down and brainstormed. We needed to think of the best ways to help our community. We realized that the small amount of youth we had in our town had little to nothing to do, and if we wanted to keep them here for the future they need to want to stay here. In our town, we have a baseball field, a park, a dirt track, a run-down swimming pool, and some old beat up basketball and tennis courts. We all decided that these would be a good place to start. So we narrowed it down and decided that the basketball and tennis courts would be the best place to start, but before we started working on those we decided to do some summer classes for the younger kids. We didn’t want to do any of the regular classes so we decided to do drama, art, music, and photography, or D.A.M.P Camp for short. We all thought a class, mine being music. All of the classes went amazing, and the feedback from the kids was absolutely amazing.
Once we had gotten done with all of the summer classes we got to work on the basketball and tennis courts. First, we had to clean up the area around the courts before we could do any repairs. First, we had to burn all the tumbleweeds and weeds. We had to pull the weeds and power wash all the dirt out if the cracks we needed to fill. That whole process took a long time to finish because of weather issues. Once we got done with that we had to fill the cracks. First we had to put foam in the larger cracks in order to use less crack sealant. After that was finished we put the crack filler in and we were ready to paint. The next day we came out and painted on brand new lines. We had gotten done just in time for Campo days in which we had a basketball tournament.
Overall, I would say my internship was pretty amazing. I was helping my community while having a great time. I would highly recommend this internship program to anyone who wants to make a big improvement to not only the object in your community, but the attitude as well.
