Great day in the morning

15 Aug Great day in the morning

Something I haven’t talked about yet this summer is my schedule. My particular internship is an office job, which means I have some flexibility with my schedule and some freedom to work from home. If I had a more traditional Mosaics internship where I had to be on-site in front of park visitors or collecting natural history data, I might not have been able to be appointed to this internship (which was hard enough as is). I’m a PhD candidate in graduate school. In order to qualify for my tuition waiver and paycheck through the school, I sign a contract that states I will only work for the school and accept no other paid work while I’m in graduate school. When I was selected for this internship, we floated the idea of volunteering, but in order to qualify for the DHA at the end of this internship, I had to be paid. Impasse. Luckily, we were able to get the appropriate approvals from the school, to allow me to take the internship paid. However, I still am obligated to complete my 20-hour/week graduate school commitments. So I work four ten-hour days here in the office and two ten-hour days at my graduate school commitments.

All this to explain why I am one of the first people to get to the office, at 7am. Perhaps the best perk of this schedule happened last week when three of the best dogs showed up at work. As I mentioned in a previous post, our office is in the former Burger King headquarters and as such, it has some pretty grounds with a Frisbee golf course and open areas where people bring their dogs to play. These three dogs broke out of their nearby home and walked down here, first thing one morning last week. I have fostered 14 dogs through the county shelter, so I was very comfortable reading their behavior and rounding them up. Luckily, they all had tags and were very well-behaved, so we called the owner and he came right over to get them. One piece of advice we’ve been given many times in this internship is to put all of our experiences on our federal resumes because you never know what will be relevant. After this, I’m seriously considering adding Office Dogcatcher to my special skills. 🙂