Kaitlyn Deaner

April’s goat, Tilly, in her cage when we brought her to the career day at an Elementary school.

Coming into my second week as an intern, I was able to learn a lot more about what UME does. On Monday, April and I attended the Sugobots competition, where 5th graders from across the county built their own robots to compete with other schools. I helped guide the kids to different rooms for demonstrations with a high school and middle school robotics team, in addition to helping with lunch. On Friday, we visited another local elementary school for their career day. April brought two of her goats and a rabbit, which the kids loved. On my end, I was able to discuss what it’s like to be in college with the kids and help with the animals. Finally, during the week, I’ve been working on planning a research project, which I am currently narrowing down the topic and hopefully getting the IRB paperwork done as soon as possible.

I can see where my prior knowledge and experiences can help me become successful in this internship. I’ve worked several different service jobs throughout the past few years, which have helped me build my interpersonal skills, such as communication and collaboration. So far in my internship, I’ve met and connected with various new people, such as students, teachers, and UME staff members. Being able to communicate effectively with all of them has been an absolute highlight, in addition to ensuring that everything is running smoothly. 

Furthermore, my experiences with research have helped me substantially with creating my research project. Through prior projects and research I have done, I came into this experience knowing how to figure out a research question, looking through prior research to see what needed to be expanded upon, and building out a skeleton for the research. This allows for the process of the project to be a bit more smooth, which I believe can help with making this a successful project and overall internship.

Overall, I have a few goals for myself during this experience. My main goal is to better understand what it’s like working with the community. I would love to learn what skills are required to do so and what I need to do to work on building those skills. Another goal that I have is that I would love to learn more about different fields in agriculture. While my main focus is nutrition, agriculture directly affects the nutrition of people, whether that be for food security or to ensure that there is a wide variety of nutritious options for the community. Outside of gardening, I’ve had very few agricultural experiences so I’m excited that this internship will help me expand my knowledge in this field.

One of the Sugobots a group of 5th graders made for their Sugobot competition, attached is a photo of the schedule that one of the 5th graders drew.