Leah Watson, CARE Intern, (Far Right)
CARE’s Background
CARE is an organization dedicated to raising awareness of how to have healthy relationships in a college setting and beyond. This means educating students about what abuse looks like, counseling survivors of abuse and working towards the eradication of the culture which allows this abuse to flourish.
A SWOT analysis for CARE will not look like a traditional for-profit SWOT because it doesn’t exist to make a profit. The strengths of CARE include the passion of the people who work there. It is unlikely a person would choose to work in a counseling center or a relationship education center if he or she didn’t deeply care about social justice, and this holds true with the interns and employees there. Other strengths include a student body that is willing to listen, as shown by the high turnout rates at our events as compared to similar events on other UW campuses.
CARE’s biggest weakness as an organization is that it does not always know what to do with its momentum. While it can fill seats for an event, often students forget or are unaware in the first place that we exist because CARE doesn’t leverage success when it gets it.
The opportunities such an organization has are many, and revolve around the mission outlined above. It has the opportunity to change a society, starting with students here at UW-Oshkosh by educating them about healthy relationships.
The threats are more nebulous: with a mission statement as lofty as “changing society,” the people who benefit from society as it exists currently do not like to see such a thing happen. CARE itself can be threatened by a lack of funding, which is always a possibility when budgets are being cut for programs that seem unnecessary.
My Experience
Leah Watson, CARE Intern (Right)
As one of two social media interns, my job is to keep the Facebook and Twitter pages updated with relevant posts about upcoming events and newsworthy happenings, such as Jaclyn Friedman coming to campus to speak. I also took the initiative to create a Tumblr page for CARE (at http://uwocare.tumblr.com), which contains posts about healthy relationships, healthy sex and resources for survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault.
This internship requires its interns to be very self-motivated; the vast majority of work takes place on your own time and will be either posted directly to one of CARE’s social media platforms, or submitted to your supervisor for perusal. A typical day for me involves trawling news websites for relevant events I can post about, reading a bit of one of the books our supervisor assigns us each week and planning for the final project, which involves tying in what I learned in my internship to my major.
Advice for Future Interns
Your boss is your best underutilized resource; don’t be afraid to ask for help. If you feel you’re under qualified, don’t! Your boss knew that he or she was hiring an intern and that many of your skills would come to you as a result of the internship.
If you have the chance, hold out for an internship that involves something you’re passionate about. The old saying “Find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” is absolutely true. So if healthy relationships are important to you, why not stop by CARE?
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