Name: Liz

Year: Junior

Majors: Political Science and English

CFS Concentration: Field Studies in Civic Engagement

Last Thursday morning, I woke up before the sun. While the rest of my house slept, I crept out the door to catch the 6:15 am train to my office in River North. There, I met up with a colleague and we drove to the South Side where we walked into ACE Tech, a Chicago Public High School, just as the first bell was ringing to start the day. As I stood in a high school entirely different from the one I had attended, I looked around and saw unfamiliar people and an unfamiliar place. And then I had a thought: this was some of the most challenging, interesting, exciting learning I had done in a long time.

My internship with the education non-profit OneGoal through Chicago Field Studies has not just gotten me out of the classroom. It has gotten me out of the Northwestern bubble. This bubble, while comfortable and safe, is restrictive. It puts boundaries on the extent of our learning, limiting us to the people and places and professors that are familiar. But CFS has broken those barriers for me. I do my learning somewhere new now, with people and in places that are wholly unfamiliar. It’s just a few miles from campus, but it feels like more than that. My internship presents new challenges and requires me to practice new skills that I have never before been able to cultivate in a classroom setting. It has pushed me beyond what is comfortable and I’m thankful for that.

As I enter the second half of the quarter, I look forward to finding myself in more situations like the one I was in last Thursday. My visit to a CPS high school classroom forced me into an environment unlike any I had experienced on Northwestern’s campus. In fact, every day at OneGoal does that for me. I make cold calls to teachers I’ve never met, come up with strategies for tackling difficult problems and take ownership of important work that is affecting people other than myself. It’s a new kind of learning; it’s not analyzing political theory or doing problem sets, but it’s difficult in its own way. I’m grateful for this new kind of difficult because it’s already making me a more adventurous, capable, experienced student and person. I look forward several more weeks of exciting growth through my internship and the amazing benefits that I am sure will stay with me afterward.