Jorie’s Winter Internship Experience
Hello – my name is Jorie Wogmon, and I was an intern with Passion Impact for the winter of 2020-21. I came into the 8-week internship during my junior year of high school – which, due to COVID, was completely virtual. Being separated from physical school made me worry that I wouldn’t have a chance to participate in internships, improve myself through work, or add to my resume. Lucky for me, I was issued the PI intern application. Once accepted, I became wonderfully occupied with school, this internship, and other preparations for my future. I’m thankful to Passion Impact for giving me a foundation to keep working on and improving upon myself. I learned a lot about budgeting, planning, and advertising for events.
The other interns (Janice, Kevin, Alina, Faith, Stella) and I worked together to plan game days, brainstorm micro-volunteer events, come up with a larger volunteer event, form a club, and, really, so much more. It was a pleasure to work with these amazing people, and I think we are all better for it. Each of us reflected on our time in the internship and came up with our favorite/most impactful activity. Hands down, mine is the Portland Cares volunteer event. I came into this internship with an itch, and that itch was to give back to the people who have spent the last 9-10 months caring for our community and defending it from COVID-19. We were then assigned to come up with a community volunteer event- which thrilled me. Our group decided to package gift bags for essential workers. This was a long process of planning, advertising, fundraising, more advertising, being flexible, and budgeting (some of these I mentioned before). Because of this, I can now, more than ever, say that I am more confident in my own abilities. This one project became a passion of mine, and I was dedicated to seeing it become a success.
This entire experience gave me the chance to apply skills that I obtained at school to the real world. I formally contacted non-profits, created a living spreadsheet for the budget, learned that it is difficult to convince people to sign up for things, and suggested See’s Candy for fundraising because I had done it before for Madison’s Red Cross club. This gave me a real sense of satisfaction, as we often don’t understand exactly how what we learn in school will apply to life- butI get it now.
I’d like to give a big thank you to Adrianna and Passion Impact for letting me grow as a person, a leader, and a student during the 8 weeks we were all together. I know that I won’t let what I learned go to waste.