Internship at the Hobson Wildenthal Honors College at UTD

During the final summer of my undergraduate career, I had the opportunity to intern with the Hobson Wildenthal Honors College at The University of Texas at Dallas. The Honors College is the home to eight different programs catered to encouraging brilliance during the students’ undergraduate career. Working part-time as a Student Worker during the previous school year, allowed me to develop a bond with the staff and doubling as an Event and Marketing intern deepened my understanding of everyone’s role.

As a student worker, I am responsible for the basic clerical duties within the office. My position as an intern, required me to devote my attention to the Clark Summer Research Program, National Merit Scholars Program, the databases for National Merit and Thomsen Fund, and the Honors College’s presence on social media. I was able to work closely with the Assistant Director of NMSP, Wendi Kavanaugh, to develop a marketing campaign for the 2019 term of the Clark program, design t-shirts and promote the Honors Program as a whole.

The task of creating flyers that could be posted around campus, social media and emailed to perspective students was one of my more tedious assignments. I was worried that some of my creations were filled with too many words, so I tried to get more creative and make something that was eye-catching, but not too busy or lacking of information. Surprisingly, this was more challenging than I had expected. It was the little imperfections and program glitches that drove me insane. It wasn’t until I stopped striving for perfection that I was able to achieve the desired product.

The first week of each month during the school year, through the Carl J. Thomsen Fund for Student Enrichment, the Assistant Director of Collegium V, Sheila Kelly releases tickets to cultural events in the Dallas area, to UTD students. A database in Microsoft Access is used to keep a record of the shows, students, and ticket assignments. Under the supervision of the Honors College Accountant, Josiah Summerville, I learned how to update the layout along with the function of each command in the Thomsen Fund database, not only making the database more efficient, but also smoothing out the overall distribution process.

Being allowed to intern at the Hobson Wildenthal Honors College was a huge blessing. I learned how to look beyond the surface of each challenge and to trust my knowledge and skill set. You have to create an efficient system to remain organized when handling sensitive information and coordinating events. With my flyers and t-shirts, I realized that the more I strived for perfection, the harder I made things on myself. Instead, I needed to aim for creative excellence without going overboard. We struggled assigning code in the database, so we decided to compare previous modules and test each change repeatedly until we accomplished the desired result. I am thankful for this opportunity and believe this experience will award a higher level of responsibilities as a student worker during my senior year.