Breakfast with Amber

March 2021: Double Snubbed

I wish I could tell you something fun or cool about March. I wish I could tell you about the workshop I went to on March 10 that I put no information about in my calendar. I wish I could tell you about the Myrtle trivia night that also has no information in the calendar. I wish I could tell you about the Intro to D&D event being held by the D&D club that I only have vague memories of. I wish I could tell you about spring break, but there was no spring break.

However, it was time for me to start thinking about summer. My parents wanted me to do something "enriching" over the summer. Last year, it was the Japanese class. This year, I had nothing. Or did I?

Last year, I attended a couple information sessions for summer programs. One was the Arts, Letters, and Enterprise (ALE) internship program where Trinity would connect students with internship opportunities at nonprofit organizations. The second was the Mellon SURF program, which was a summer research program where students would be paired with a faculty member and do research with them for the summer. I pretty much dropped both of them once COVID came around, but it was 2021, and I was back on campus. I was going to apply for some stuff.

For the ALE program, there must have been at least 20 organizations to choose from, but they only allowed us to apply to two maximum to ensure we were applying for the ones we were really interested in. The first one was Gemini Ink, an organization that teaches creative writing classes to the community, because writing, duh. I went for the option to apply to two because the strategy of applying to a bunch of places and seeing what sticks got me into college.

(I'm being serious. I applied to 20 colleges. I was good with 16, but Mom insisted we max out the Common Application.)

Anyway, the second organization I picked was disABILITYsa because they had a communications internship opens, and autism counts as a mental disability, right?

The application consisted of three components: my resume, my transcript, and a one-page essay describing why I wanted to be there and what skills I could bring to the table. The first problem: I didn't have a resume on hand. I made one for my college application, didn't I? I could use that. I sent a real quick Snapchat message to my dad to ask him for a copy of my transcript. Once the resume hit my e-mail, I was ready to go.

The applications (plural since we had to submit a separate application for each organization) were Google Docs, so I could just copy and paste the whole thing onto each document and then try to format it to get it onto one page like the original document. For some reason, I associate frantically trying to re-format my resume on two separate documents with listening to "Rollin'" by Brave Girls while eating leftover pizza that I had for some reason, and the heater wasn't able to keep up with the cold, so I was wearing a jacket inside.

Second, I had to put my transcript in the document. Not a separate file. It had to be in the document. They accepted unofficial transcripts, so I didn't have to go to the registrar's office. I could just download it from TigerPAWS, our school's portal for stuff like grades and class registration. There must have been an option to export it to a JPG from Adobe Acrobat because these transcripts are downloaded in PDF form, and I don't think you can add a PDF to a Google Doc.

Then came the third and final portion: the essay. The part where I pour my heart out about how much writing/disability advocacy means to me and how much I'd love this internship.

The one for Gemini Ink was easier. Talking about writing is a lot less touchy-feely than talking about autism (or writing, as the case may be). I started the essay with "For as long as I can remember, I've been a die-hard writer. I spend an hour every day developing my stories, I'm majoring in English, and I want to be an author when I graduate. When I found out there was a creative writing organization looking for interns, I knew I had to apply."