Columbus Foundation Fellowship Programs

So far, this week has been jam-packed with valuable learning experiences.

Monday, the Columbus Foundation hosted an etiquette lunch for fellows and for students interning with The Ohio State University. I’ve never been to an etiquette lunch before and, to be honest, I didn’t know what to expect. I was imagining that scene in The Princess Diaries where Julie Andrews corrects all of Anne Hathaway’s little idiosyncrasies. But I’m happy to say it was nothing like that. Turns out the meaning of etiquette is not necessarily perfect posture or royal refinement, but rather putting those around you at ease. Our etiquette lunch was truly fine etiquette because we all felt comfortable enough to make mistakes and ask hard questions, like “What is the proper response when a table mate has something in his/her teeth?” I was surprised by the things I learned on Monday, many of which overturned my idea of what “proper etiquette” was (wrist check, anyone?). And so began a week of challenging misconceptions.

On Wednesday I was able to sit in on a Per Scholas board meeting. I’d been looking forward to this experience since arriving at Per Scholas because in non-profits, board members are a pretty big deal. In school, I had a non-profit business minor so in many of my classes we discussed what it’s like to work with an advisory board. My impression from my coursework was that boards can be difficult to work with because members may not know the daily ins and outs of the business or be as invested in the business because they have their own careers to focus on. I’m happy to say that is not the case at Per Scholas. The board members I’ve met have all brought valuable and informed perspectives to the table. They care deeply about the work being done here and are committed to helping us do it better. I was impressed with how willing board members were to offer their networks, talents, and resources for the betterment of Per Scholas Columbus. I think that working with a board can be difficult if you don’t know how to utilize the talents offered, but the meeting this week showed me that board members are truly an invaluable resource for non-profit businesses.

These experiences and a hundred others this week reminded me that I don’t know much at all. I’m continually being challenged to see things in a new way. As I round out the sixth week of my fellowship, I am overwhelmingly thankful for the ways this experience has shaped and re-shaped my view of the world.

With camp over, this has been a pretty mellow week at Shepherd’s Corner. It has given me time to work on other projects for Ask the Land, and do some reflecting on my time here so far.

I made a brochure this won the birds of Shepherd’s Corner. After the birding excursions with Jim McCormac and another group from Sharon Woods Metro Parks, we have added six new birds to the list since the 1997 Ask the Land survey! The new birds are the Green heron, Ring-billed gull, Eastern towhee (pictured below on left), wild turkey, Cape may warbler (pictured below on right), and an Orange-crowned warbler.

On the inside page of the brochure there is a checklist of all the birds on the land, and it gives visitors the opportunity to go out and find as many of the birds as they can. This mini challenge gets people engaged and connected with the creatures that have made Shepherd’s Corner their home. People are able to see, up close, the habitats that support these birds, and many other animals, which makes preserving the land a more personal experience. The brochure also emphasizes the global impact of our actions. These birds are not only having effects on this environment, but also on the environments to which they migrate. An example is the Scarlet tanager (pictured on right), which summers in Eastern North America and winters in Costa Rica. We rely on birds for the seed disperal and the survival of many plants, and these plants are a food source and home to many other creatures. Therefore it is important to protect each piece of the web of life in order to keep life going!

This week has also allowed me to do some reflecting on how the land is being affected by the introduction of the surrounding housing developments. There is a lot of construction that is taking place around shepherd’s Corner, and I can only imagine the daily stress that it puts on our wildlife. Since this land is one of the only large forest areas for many animals to go, there is increased competition for food, resources, and shelter. This means that many animals have to put even more time and energy into either foraging, defending territory, or raising their young which leaves less focus on two of the others. This could mean less seed dispersal of plants, eventually leading to less food for humans. And this isn’t just an issue of Shepherd’s Corner. It is occuring world wide.

As humans, we rely so heavily, whether many know it or not, on so many other life forms for our existence. It is imperative that we gather our resources and knowledge to protect this earth. It is the only home that we have.

Two weeks ago, my boss, Gina, called me into her office to provide me with some additional work for the week. Among several other tasks, Gina wanted me to start the process of hiring additional teachers. Specifically, Gina wanted me to post the jobs externally, collect resumes, screen the candidates via a phone interview, schedule in person interviews with the top candidates, and sit in on the interviews. At this initial meeting, Gina warned me that hiring staff is a difficult, time consuming, and expensive process. Although I usually take Gina’s words and advice seriously, I remember brushing them aside this time. These words seemed to go against my preconceived notions about the nature of hiring. In the hiring process, employers are the ones with the power and the applicants are the ones trying to impress the company or organization. Hiring is difficult and stressful for the applicants – not employers – right? Wrong. Throughout the past two weeks, I have learned that Gina was correct when she warned me about the challenges that lay ahead. Although I have faced several challenges during this process, the biggest challenge has been finding qualified, but no overqualified, candidates for the position.

Before starting this process, I always thought that we lived in an employer’s market: an economy with limitless qualified candidates and a scarcity of job openings. Although this may have been true during the Great Recession, this is not the state of the current employment market for early childhood educators. Although I have probably received over one hundred resumes for four positions, I easily eliminated about forty percent of them for either not having the minimum qualifications or for having red flags on their resume. After attempting to call the remaining sixty, about half of them never returned my calls or responded to my emails. Another ten I was able to eliminate for lack of professionalism or lack of interest on the phone. This left me with twenty candidates. Another five asked to be removed from consideration after finding another job, or discovering that we were hiring for full time, rather than part time or seasonal, employment. Therefore, in the end, a field of about one hundred applicants was dwindled down to about fifteen before we even got to meet them in person.

Even with fifteen candidates remaining, I suspect that additional challenges remain ahead. First, I cannot help but suspect that several of the candidates are overqualified. Although I work at an outstanding four-star facility that has to be a draw for any candidate, many of our candidates have held jobs more senior to the positions for which they applied. This wealth of overqualified candidates has led to an interesting situation in which we have appeared to be doing more of the “selling” than the candidates. During interviews, they have been the ones asking us questions, and we were the ones that felt the pressure to inform them of all of the exciting things happening at the CELC. This was not the dynamic that I was expecting and certainly did not make the process any less difficult.

In the end, between trying to stay organized with one hundred resumes floating around my desk and trying to find suitable candidates, hiring staff is shaping up to be one of the greatest challenges of my fellowship. At the same time, it has also led me to my biggest surprises. Although finding a job is not an easy or stress-free process by any means, it is not necessarily as easy as it appears for the employers across the table either.

(Note: The postings on this site are of my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Columbus Early Learning Centers)

Week 5

This week was a very short week! I started the week off with taking care of my own oral health with a check-up visit to my dentist. When I got to the clinic, I started with making edits to the brochure in the morning. I caught up on a lot of emails I had to send and finished up the day with researching other clinics!

I learned a ton on Tuesday! I spent the whole day shadowing one of our KidSMILES board members, Dr. Jeff Milton, at his private practice in Powell, Olentangy Pediatric Dentistry. I started the day by observing a few basic procedures and a surgery that required oral sedation. It was really cool to see how Dr. Milton utilized different techniques to make each patient comfortable and how well he communicated with parents and patients. The office itself had a fantastic, kid-friendly feel to it, and kids could really have fun and feel comfortable with the atmosphere of Dr. Milton’s practice. I was very surprised at the volume of patients Dr. Milton saw in the morning, while balancing a surgery, check-ups, and different types of procedures. After we got the chance for a break during lunch, I got to talk to Dr. Milton about his path through dentistry, some of the ideas I have for my future goals in dentistry, and some specific questions that came up in the morning. After lunch, I continued my shadowing where I observed Dr. Milton work with a few patients with special needs. I was again, even more surprised and impressed at how Dr. Milton handled his patients and worked with his patient’s parents so well.

I noticed many of his patients were referred to him by general dentists and other patients because Dr. Milton was so experienced and had much more training from his pediatric dentistry residency and CE courses. After Dr. Milton saw all his patients for the day, we talked for a good twenty minutes about what I saw and some questions I had about the dental school admissions process. I got some really good insights about my dental school training, and also some insights about my interests in specializing in pediatric dentistry.

On Wednesday, I spent the morning finalizing the patient brochure and organizing all of our outreach photographs we have had since the inception of the outreach program. In the afternoon, I had a meeting with Laura and our VISTAs working at the clinic talking about our outreach program and our history. It was great that Eric and Tionne got a chance to come to an outreach visit last Friday to experience what we do firsthand. At this meeting, we talked more about the history, broader impact, and the goal behind the outreach program.

I finished up the week on Thursday by going to an outreach visit with Eric with the WARM Summer Lunch Program (pictures to come). We went to Walnut Ridge Park near uptown Westerville and saw about 20 kids. It was really interesting because this site usually has a lot of activities for the kids. This week, a youth pastor from a local Westerville Church brought tons of drums and drum sticks and his own drum set for a drum circle with the kids!

I gave a large group presentation to all of the kids about oral health in general and played the nutrition game with different healthy and unhealthy food choices with the group. After our presentation, we brought out the chocolate frosting activity and poster games for the kids to play with. We also handed out goodie bags to all of the kids. Overall, it was a fantastic visit!

When I got back to the clinic, we had a mini-informal-team meeting where we discussed all of our accomplishments the past two weeks. We talked about some of our next steps and had a great conversation. After, the VISTAs and I got a comprehensive overview of fundraising and development from Norma. It was so cool to learn about fundraising and development – a field I know very little about, but I really should know a lot about! In any path I want to take through dentistry, I think it’s important to know basic principles, and if I ever need to, get a good picture of what happens in a fundraising and development team. Norma’s perspective and experience was really cool to hear because she has led departments and initiatives at universities, Columbus Museum of Art, Girl Scouts, and more.

I had such a fantastic week and I learned about different topics I would never have been exposed to. This fellowship has been fantastic not only in helping me learn more about dentistry, but broaden my perspective and knowledge of different fields that are so relevant to my future goals!

Five weeks in. The fellowship has reached its midway point. Wow. Didn’t we just get started? There is still so much I would like to learn and do with my host site, and it is a painful realization that my work will inevitably be cut short in just five more short weeks. I suppose this is par the course for life; one moment you are starting something–high school, college, an internship, or in this case, a fellowship–and the next thing you know it’s all over. We’re left scraping the annals of our subconscious, attempting to recollect and hold on to all of the memories and lessons from that experience before it all becomes a mere blip in our memory, remembered only as a blur of various events. I am determined to make the most of these final five weeks here. I will continue building relationships with all of the wonderful individuals I have had the good fortune of working with this summer. I will continue to produce increasingly efficient and high quality work. And I will continue soak up as much information as I possibly can throughout the remaining duration of my time here.

 

This past week I met with my mentor, and boss, and discussed my future career. We discussed the prospect of interning in a corporate law firm, a career objective of mine in the next year or two, and an area of expertise for my mentor who worked in the corporate law realm for a multitude of years. She has graciously furnished me with advice from her previous experiences, including the ostensibly minute details that would be lost on other law students, which will provide me with a slight advantage over my peers and a head start in my future workplace. This has proven to be one of the most remunerative aspects of the fellowship this summer: working directly with an attorney that has had a career arch that I aspire to emulate one day. Virtually no other experience I could have had this summer would have been as pertinent or impactful than what I am currently engaged in.

Aren’t the point of blogs to be transparent? If so, I definitely believe what I will be writing about will hit the nail on the head. The past week or so at my fellowship was tough. I felt like I was spinning my wheels with solutions to our little numbers in our kids’ time programming. I had done a lot of advertising (it worked a little), but I knew that we were not at a satisfactory point. As I wrote about last week, week one we had zero kids and week two we had five. That’s pretty discouraging. On Tuesday, my supervisor and the branch executive sat down and talked about solutions. We brought up good questions, brain stormed a lot of ideas, and talked about moving forward. That next day, I went into the program with the best attitude I could. We had a fourth of July party with worksheets, snacks, and kickball. Needless to say, it was awesome! We had a total of sixteen kids total! Kids who attended were between the ages of 6 and 12. When I was recording the attendance at the end of the day, I knew the break through had finally happened. It felt so good to go from discouragement to complete encouragement! I am very excited to see what the next few weeks have in store at the YMCA.

It was as delicious as it looks.

The theme of this week was: Struggles and Payoffs. As I said last week, Per Scholas students graduated this week. As they reflected on the challenges they have had to overcome, I was met with a challenge or two myself. Yet at the end of the week I think we were all reminded that a lot can be accomplished with perseverance and confidence.

I’ve identified my nemesis this week and its name is “Survey Response Rate.” As part of my responsibilities at Per Scholas, I’ve been tasked with surveying area IT leaders to learn more about what training and experience employers are looking for. Everything up until this point had been going very well. Creating the survey? No prob. Assembling a contact list? Got it covered. Getting people to actually take the survey? Oh boy. I did some research about online surveys and response rates and found some solace. Turns out the average response rate for e-mail surveys is 24.8%. Phew! I think we’ll come in above that. But at any (response) rate, our ultimate goal is to assemble enough data to inform smart and responsible decisions. The survey closes next week, so send some good vibes my way that we’ll get an overwhelming response in the next few days. 😉

This is Dennis Adamets, the class valedictorian. An awesome guy!

Yesterday was a wonderful celebration of folks who have achieved a lot and who refused to give up on themselves. For many students, eight weeks ago the odds seemed insurmountable. Now, these students are trained professionals and many of them already have new careers waiting for them. Awesome, right?! I was moved by the words of Robin Green, former Director of Business Solutions at Per Scholas. Her advice to the graduates was this: “Get all you can. Can all you get. But whatever you do, don’t sit on the can.” Her call to share gifts and talents rather than “sit on them” was compelling.

Every name on this program represents an inspiring and capable individual.

The best part of the ceremony, as it is with any graduation, was to watch the degrees conferred unto the graduates. Honestly, this entire group of students has welcomed me in so completely and treated me with such love and goodness that it’s hard to imagine another class could ever compare. I will miss them dearly, but I wish them every happiness and it is my hope and prayer that no good thing would be withheld from them.

GroundWork group’s new blog!

Yesterday, GroundWork group launched a new blog in celebration of their 10th anniversary. Go check it out here! Though I haven’t really had that much to do with the blog, they were inspired my the blogging that the fellows are doing when considering starting their own. They will mostly be posting technology and nonprofit advice, but will also be hosting some guest bloggers on occasion. It’s always an exciting thing to witness an organization trying something new – I’m looking forward to seeing the response they receive.

I was at Prevent Blindness Ohio again this week in order to get some of the last key pieces of information for my research project. I feel like I have compiled most of the information I need for my report on how their information management system can be more efficiently used, now comes the task of combining everything into a complete document.

One of the things I’ve had the most fun with this week was working on redesigning GroundWork group’s flyers and brochures. It’s nice to take a break from the research and embrace my creative side. I’ve recently discovered this awesome (and free) website called Canva.com where you can create different photos and documents using their stock layouts, shapes, text designs, and more. I’ve been using it in my personal life, so I decided I’d give it a shot for professional use. I don’t necessarily think I would use Canva to create a finished look (for the types of things I’m working on at least), but it’s a good way to sketch out ideas before drafting final layouts in InDesign.

Working on the brochure

I’m looking forward to the upcoming long weekend to take a bit of a break. The summer is rushing by and I have so much work to do before it’s over! Have a good 4th of July everyone! (I created the image below on Canva – I’m seriously addicted haha)

Greetings! Sorry about the absence this past week! I was out of town and visiting family in North Carolina this past week. It was a great time of sun, boating, tubing, and living the White Lake Life as we like to call it. However, I am now back in Columbus and back in action at the Pizzuti Collection.

While I was gone, we had our first week with our new junior docents. I am immensely grateful for the help and support of my coworkers and interns, who really stepped up to the plate this past week, filling in for me and getting the JD’s oriented here at the museum.

I came back to work Tuesday to a lot of changes! We have our freshly hung This Just In: New Acquisitions exhibition (it is AMAZING, I highly recommend coming to the Collection and giving it a look!). With a members opening that evening, and the Collection is now open to the public 5 days a week! Tuesday- Saturday 11-5. This has changed traffic through the Collection, but it is exciting to see visitors in everyday that I work now! We have also started giving tours to the Boys and Girls Club Summer groups twice a week, so the daily routine has definitely been lightly shaken up a bit.

Back to the Junior Docents, now. I have the pleasure of working with 6 teens from the Boys and Girls Club of Columbus(Pictures and more info to come in these next few weeks). They will be learning the ins and outs to museum nonprofit work and training to become docents for our Fall Exhibition, Us Is Them. They were placed at the Collection through the BGCC summer SOARhire program and we are delighted to have them. They are at the Collection Tuesday-Saturday learning and working alongside our staff here. We do a number of activities that provide job training for the teens. We work on skills such as customer service skills, cashiering skills, public speaking, researching, presenting, the list goes on an on. We do, however, have the privilege to take kind of a unique focus with our program by focusing on art and art related concepts such as creativity in this job training. I think the Junior Docents will (hopefully!) leave this summer with a new appreciation for art and a unique and creative, outside-the-box, perspective on the kinds of skills it takes to be successful in today’s working world.

The first week (though shortened by the holiday) has been excellent here. The JDs are really starting to take ownership and a sense of pride in the Collection as their place of employment and a part of their city’s cultural landscape. Hopefully this will follow them at the end of the summer.

Well that’s about all for now! I will check back in with you all next week and let you know how everything is going!

Stay Classy, Columbus.

Jessie