My name is Lo Ben-Israel and I am majoring in Criminal Justice, so I wasn’t sure how I would do throughout the internship, as I wasn’t sure of how my education would prepare me for the field. I was excited to intern at the Hospitality House, as I had previously volunteered there for a different class, and figured that I was already decently aware of the system of operations within the shelter.
I had come into the internship with the idea of a project that I wanted to do, but did not know how I would go about that, as I had no experience with planning. Thankfully, the staff were open to help me learn how I could go about that. I was incredibly thankful to work with the site therapist, Jenna Crawley, and help host Art in Community, which is a weekly event where members of the community can create whatever they feel drawn to do.
Simply being able to interact with the clients also helped me understand things about the Appalachian region that I would never have known otherwise, and I think that alone made the internship worth it. I got to hear everything from ghost stories to recollections of local bands from long before I got here. Watching people progress in life, and being able to watch it from start to finish has been an amazing experience, and has been an amazing experience that I did not have prior to working here.
I would recommend an internship at the Hospitality House because I ended up learning a lot of skills that I would never have expected to in such a short amount of time. The ability to work in so many different environments was incredibly helpful to me, as I tend to get easily distracted, but was able to focus much better due to my ability to change tasks if anything became repetitive. I was also thankful to to interact with so many people from different walks of life, neither of which I would have probably been able to elsewhere.