Internship Project

Sydney Sanders

KINS 4306
 For my internship, I have been working with the Women’s Center & LGBTQ+ Programs

at Georgia College. The Women’s Center has lots of amazing projects, but this semester, my

work team and I introduced a totally new type of project. Our project aim was to cultivate a

video library of inclusive sexual education videos for Georgia College students to access and

learn from. We have accomplished several well researched and very creative scripts for videos to

go in this video library.

According to National College Health Assessment data, approximately 65 percent of

Georgia College students were sexually active in some way, shape, or form in 2019. Therefore, it

is safe to say that the majority of our school’s population is sexually active. It is also true to say

that the majority of Georgia College & State University’s students identify themselves as

heterosexual, or straight. However, 15 percent of Georgia College students reported to identify

themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, pansexual, questioning, or other sexuality as of 2019.

While this group of students is in the minority, that 15 percent represents over one thousand

students. The purpose of this project is to provide sexual education that is mindful and inclusive

of all genders and sexualities, to the students at Georgia College because there is a gap in

research and resources of the type of educational content this project aims to address. It is in the

best interest of the sexual health and safety of the student population, so myself and my

supervisors at the Women’s Center and LGBTQ+ Programs believe that there is a need for this

project, a need that we are working to fill.

As I mentioned previously, this type of project has never before been done at the

Women’s Center. This project also has the ability to draw a lot of controversy due to the delicate

subject matter of the videos. This is why my teammates and I have not gotten as far as we had

initially hoped to get by this point in the semester. Each of our scripts have needed to be
meticulously reviewed by our internship supervisors and revised by us before being resubmitted

for supervisor approval. It has taken a long time to gain approval from my supervisor, so the

final product for my project has become a set of scripts rather than videos, like I had initially

planned. Each script takes a tremendous amount of researching and planning before even being

written, so I am still quite proud of the scripts that we have cultivated this semester. My script is

about a specific resource that encourages and facilitates communication between sexual partners.

I was granted basically total creative freedom in my creation of this script. I believe this is why I

am still very proud of the work I have done on this project for the semester even though we did

not get to film the videos as we had originally planned to do, we were only able to get some raw

footage that will have to be edited likely next semester. Throughout the semester I became rather

discouraged and frustrated when I realized that with how long it was taking to gain approval for

my script and my teammates’ scripts, we would probably not get to film all of our videos, if any,

before the end of the semester. However, after speaking with one of my supervisors about this,

she reminded me that my team and I had done everything we were expected to do and everything

we could do for the time being, so simply because we did not achieve our original goal, this does

not mean that we didn’t accomplish anything. Overall, I believe my project went as well it could

have.

While my project did go well, there are a couple of things that I would do differently if I

had known at the beginning of the semester what I know now. The biggest thing that I would do

differently is to change the expectation of what the final project will be. So, instead of planning

to have an entire video library at the end of the semester, I would have planned to have a script

collection approved and ready for filming and production at the beginning of next semester for

the next group of interns to do since I will have graduated by then. Another thing that I would do
differently is to discuss working on multiple scripts at once with the supervisor in charge of

reviewing and approving them. This semester my supervisor was rather overwhelmed with some

of the other events and projects that the Women’s Center was doing, so it took her longer to get

through our scripts. If I had been working on multiple scripts simultaneously, I could have

submitted more scripts at once to begin the long process of reviewing and revising rather than

one at a time. However, because this is a new project, we did not do that this time because this

type of project has never been done by the Women’s Center, so we did not know the length of

the process like we now know it.

In conclusion, I believe that my project went very well all things considered. I am proud

of the material I created, and I am proud of my teammates. There are certainly things that we

could have done better, but we were in uncharted waters with this project, so I think we

navigated it nicely. I am happy with my project, and I cannot wait to see how it progresses in the

future even after I have graduated.