Orientation Week

Orientation week was pretty awesome. We started off the week learning the basics of the job (as basic as basic gets when talking to 13 people with 13 different jobs).

sort of like this I guess....

The interns then had a sweet scavenger hunt put on by one of last year's interns, and my friend, the great Shay Barker. We were able to visit many cool places within Camrose om the second day of orientation. My group went to City Hall to meet with the city manager, then we went to Service Canada to talk about youth job opportunities, followed by a visit to Camrose community services. After eating lunch in a nice green space, we made our way to a nice high school in Camrose and talked to a grade 11 social class. Aside from all the 16-17 year old girls hitting on the one intern, we had the opportunity to learn about the wants and needs of the youth in Camrose are. Then a trip to Twig and the Baily Theatre ended the fun portion of the day (we, the interns, had to go and do some research afterwards).

it looks nicer today....

The next day (which happened to be Wednesday if you can't keep track) we had to present on our lovely scavenger hunt and present an ideal rural community (which may have been forgotten to be talked about, but that's another story). I talked about locally owned businesses in a rural economy. The basic moral of the story is, take risks and you might get rewarded. It also takes a lot of time and energy to run your own business. So remember kids, don't think you can own a business unless you want to work 70+ hours a week. It seems like a lot, but it's totally worth it (at least according to every small personal business owner I've talked to). we then got to meet with one of Augustana's lovely reference librarians and we learned about 'grey literature'. It sounds scary/shady/sketchy/ready to punch you in the face, but in reality it's just (mostly) unpublished articles.

not this sort of grey....

Thursday started with the exciting task of research! (I put that with an exclamation mark to show my excitement about research!) [I did it again]. My group is focused on newcomer inclusion in communities. To take up space (but to excite you more I assume) I'll tell you about our proposal! We are going to do a literature review to see how other communities have included newcomers in social activities in community. Once we agree to what the general "theory" is about new comer inclusion, we'll be conduction self-case studies. We will be interviewing different people, along with looking into the resources available in each community we are currently residing/working/eating in at the time. I'll keep you updated as I progress in my research.

not quite this bad....

Finally on Friday some of the community supervisors were able to come to Camrose and talk to the lovely people in charge of the Learning and Beyond office - aka the LaB - and the Alberta Centre of Sustainable Rural Communities, aka the ACSRC (I really should ask to use their names, I assume they would love to have their names on anything on the internet). This was the first face to face meeting between the interns and their community supervisor. There was a large group discussion about the opportunities, challenges and the needs of rural communities. In total, the community supervisors were in Camrose for 4 hours, which was ample time to start networking and building other connections. After that, the interns broke for the weekend, where we embarked on out journeys to out host communities! 

To Cold Lake I went!

G