{"id":126,"date":"2026-09-30T18:13:01","date_gmt":"2026-09-30T18:13:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.admissions.uiowa.edu\/harper\/?p=126"},"modified":"2026-09-30T18:13:01","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T18:13:01","slug":"the-semester-of-internships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.admissions.uiowa.edu\/harper\/2026\/09\/30\/the-semester-of-internships\/","title":{"rendered":"The Semester of Internships"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hi readers!<\/p>\n<p>I hope everyone&#8217;s start of the semester has been off to a great start, or the start of fall has treated you well. This semester I&#8217;m heading into my second year on campus, with four more semesters to go before I graduate. It seems weird to be halfway through my time here already, but regardless, I enjoy every minute.<\/p>\n<p>This semester I was supposed to have a busy class workload with around 18 semester hours; however, many things changed with my schedule this semester.<\/p>\n<p>Firstly, I added and dropped about three classes. I had a studio class that wasn&#8217;t working for me, a Spanish class I didn&#8217;t have time for, and an art history course I enrolled in two weeks after the start date. This was terrifying, as I hate not knowing things and understanding my schedule; however, it went a lot more smoothly than I realized, and everything worked out perfectly. Now, I&#8217;m taking two studio courses, a biology gen-ed, and an art history course.<\/p>\n<p>Alongside this, however, I was given the opportunity to intern at The Englert Theatre as a graphic design intern for the year! I saw the listing for the position two weeks before school started, and learned of my start date the first week of school. I&#8217;m currently trying to figure out how to navigate school, my regular part-time job, and now my internship, time- and productivity-wise. I was always terrified to get an internship, but now as I&#8217;m heading into my second month at Englert, I&#8217;ve learned a couple of things that make it easier.<\/p>\n<p>Firstly, <strong>time management is a learned skill, not a given.<\/strong> If you look at my Google Calendar, it looks like I&#8217;m busy from 7am all the way to 11pm, but I&#8217;m really blocking off time in my day to focus on productivity and certain things like homework, internship stuff, and general things. It&#8217;s definitely been a learning curve on how to work on things in a timely and designated manner; however, now that I&#8217;ve been focusing on it, it feels a lot better to navigate.<\/p>\n<p>Secondly,<strong> it&#8217;s okay to not do anything<\/strong>. I&#8217;m a huge football fan, and you can find me tailgating and running around near Kinnick every Saturday. However, I get terrified to go to the football games this semester, as I always have something to do. So for the first few games, yes, you would see me at Kinnick, but I would be on my phone writing an essay and not paying attention to my friends. I started forgetting the fun of game days, and was only absorbed in what I needed to do. So to combat that, I made my Fridays a jam-packed focus day, making my Saturday more pleasurable as I had fewer things to worry about.<\/p>\n<p>Lastly, <strong>you earned this!<\/strong> I&#8217;ve had a lot of imposter syndrome in this internship, as I have a lot of questions, don&#8217;t know that many things, and constantly have to fix things when my boss says no. It started making me think I didn&#8217;t know what I was doing and regretting doing the internship. However, one of my coworkers noticed my hesitance building and said to me, &#8220;We chose you because you&#8217;re Harper, not a manufactured robot.&#8221; So whenever you achieve or gain something, know that it was given or accomplished because you did it as yourself, not as someone else.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s see how the rest of this semester goes, and I hope the start of your October is full of pumpkins and cool weather!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hi readers! I hope everyone&#8217;s start of the semester has been off to a great start, or the start of fall has treated you well. This semester I&#8217;m heading into my second year on campus, with four more semesters to go before I graduate. It seems weird to be halfway through my time here already, but regardless, I enjoy every minute. This semester I was supposed to have a busy class workload with around 18 &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.admissions.uiowa.edu\/harper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.admissions.uiowa.edu\/harper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.admissions.uiowa.edu\/harper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.admissions.uiowa.edu\/harper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.admissions.uiowa.edu\/harper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.admissions.uiowa.edu\/harper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":129,"href":"https:\/\/blog.admissions.uiowa.edu\/harper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126\/revisions\/129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.admissions.uiowa.edu\/harper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.admissions.uiowa.edu\/harper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.admissions.uiowa.edu\/harper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}