Wooo, it feels good to be wrapping up this experience however bittersweet it may feel. I really enjoyed this internship as this one was the best one I’ve done yet, but I’m also ready to move onto other projects! This year, my internship was through Ogallala Commons unlike any of my previous internships. I worked closely with Darryl Birkenfeld, my dad John Wittler, as well as with my partner Raelynn Sandoval. I interned as a “developer of digital and media resources”. This basically means that I work a lot on cleaning up zoom call recordings, I conducted a few interviews with local farmers about their businesses for the Ark Valley Foodshed Project, and I also worked on a few other projects like compiling the OC Virtual E-Fair videos into one big video to showcase all the entries together.
My three goals at the beginning of this internship were to learn how to write emails better, learn how to communicate better virtually, and to improve my leadership skill by acting as a mentor to my partner who was a first-year intern. I feel like I have adequately and successfully checked the boxes of all of these goals as I have emailed a lot of people during this internship, have jumped on to a bunch of zoom calls, and helped Raelynn navigate all that is being an intern!
My favorite part of my internship this year was getting to interview people about their business and how it related to the local foodshed. I got to travel out to people’s locations and see their operation, as well as sit down with them and really get to know what they did and why. I then got to take the recorded interview and make a video about them highlighting their business and share it on GrowSECO’s social media! I also enjoyed interviewing OC Intern Alumns and doing the same thing except I asked about how the internship impacted their lives instead of what crops they grew!
A big challenge I faced was with my editing program when the videos I was editing would need about a 3 hour export time. This was really frustrating as when a video was exporting, I wasn’t able to edit since the program was in use. This meant that if I exported during the day I could only work on things that didn’t require me to use my editing program I overcame this challenge by figuring out that if I left the project exporting overnight, I could use all my time during the day to be productive and edit!
Overall, I had a great experience being an intern and I believe that I learned some very valuable skills! I would definitely recommend being an intern to anyone and everyone who has the chance as it helped shape me for the better!!
-Signing off, Alea Wittler
