I’ve spent the afternoon churning out work in the lovely Birdie’s Cafe on Main Street in Westminster.
Confession: The title of this post might have been a little misleading. I am not actually interning at coffee shops this semester. However, I have found that they are lovely places to complete work for my internship.
Let me tell you about my internship itself before I get to the fun stuff. This semester, I am interning at the Carroll County Health Department. My job is to spend three hours a week making edits and suggestions to written content that the Health Department plans to post to their new website in-progress. I’ve also been helping my supervisor learn a little bit about how HTML works by indicating in the documents I have been editing what words need to be formatted as headers. In the process of completing this internship, I’ve learned a lot about web and health literacy, which I think are important things to know about regardless of whether I work for another health department again.
Now here’s the fun stuff–because so much of the work that I do does not require me to go to the Health Department (and because there isn’t much space for me to do that work at the Health Department), I can work pretty much wherever I choose. Often, I find myself cramming in internship work on Thursday nights in my dorm room, since I often meet with my supervisor on Friday afternoons. However, I occasionally do internship work at local coffee shops.
On afternoons after meeting at the Health Department, I’ll head to JeannieBird Baking Company, where the pastries are delicious. Since they close at 5 (which is actually kind of late for a bakery), I choose this option when I don’t foresee myself working for very long and only want to get an extra half an hour or hour in.
Today, however, I decided to go to Birdie’s Cafe, since I was in more of a latte mood than a pastry mood. (JeannieBird has good pastries but no specialty coffee. Birdie’s has specialty coffee but no real pastries.)
I thought I’d only be here for about an hour (I’d initially wanted to take a nap right after my internship meeting), but I’ve been here for two-and-a-half hours and counting. (I will have to make myself leave for dinner soon though.) At least 75 percent the songs I’ve heard while here are also songs on my iPod, and the gloomy April weather outside has made this this setting particularly cozy. Enough people have come and gone for me to not feel isolated, but it hasn’t been so noisy that I can’t concentrate. And of course, the wifi is free : )
I think I’m going to have to squeeze in a few more Birdie’s trips before I graduate next month — the amount of stuff I’ve been able to get done while here has been phenomenal!
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