An Urban Experience

By Lyndsay Walters

It was her first day.

She had been given the profile of her first client. He was from the Dominican Republic, 42 years old and worked as a cook at McDonald’s.

For their first English lesson they were to meet at the local library. She arrived and scanned the room, not seeing a man she thought fit this description.
Then, a man dressed in khaki shorts and a polo shirt with tortoise shell sunglasses approached her, asking if she was Maria.

“I was really confronted with one of my own stereotypes that I didn’t like to think that I had,” said Miami junior Maria Citino, a social work major, of her first client at the Dominican Learning Center, where she worked one day a week this past summer.

Citino’s service-learning experience was part of a 15-year-old program called the Urban Leadership Internship Program.

Affectionately called ULIP by its participants, the paid summer experience, sponsored by the university honors and scholars program, puts students in either Chicago, Columbus, Cincinnati or Cleveland and encourages them to have “a holistic educational experience,” said coordinator Katie Egart.

The internship program is unique because of its continued ability to impact lives— both those of the students who participate and those of the people with whom they work. Professional internships often help to clarify career aspirations. However, the students often find the most rewarding portion of the program to be the exposure to a city, all of the diversity it brings, and the empowering and sometimes demystifying experience of providing service to a community in need.
Although helping others, the students themselves come away from the experience with a new education, new perspectives and, often, new goals.

Allowing the students to immerse themselves into their urban environment, the service-learning component of the program challenges them to learn in all of the environments they find themselves in, Egart said.

Senior John McNulty, who participated in the program in 2003, was surprised by the impact the service-learning component had on him. Working at the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland and spending one day a week at Youth Outdoors, a summer program sponsored by Cleveland Metro Parks, McNulty looked forward to every Friday as he sifted through the rest of his week.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” he said. “You get an image of what inner-city kids are like — unteachable… instead it was totally different. They were so excited. You could actually see them getting a lot out of it.”

Sophomores and juniors with a minimum 3.3 g.p.a are encouraged to apply to the program —and the growing number of applications in recent years lends reinforcement to the program’s purpose. The program began 15 years ago with only a few cities involved and only 15 participants. For this summer’s urban adventure, however, 80 applications were received for only 25 spots in four cities.
While the program is open to all majors, an overwhelming number of Arts and Science students participate. Although the concept of the program was initially geared toward students in the business school, Egart said, business students often have more internship opportunities presented to them.

Students are given a stipend of approximately $3,500 for the summer. The costs of the program are supported by an initial endowment from the Kettering Fund, matched by the university, as well as a donation from the Luedeke family. The stipend allows students to find internships that are truly unique to their career aspirations and personal interests.

“From dance companies to banks,” an incredibly diverse group is represented, Egart said. Within the college, participants cover the broad spectrum of majors, ranging from Spanish to chemistry to anthropology. The internship is a time to put these majors to the test, seeing how they are applicable to real life.

Junior Maria Wellman, a speech pathology major, found herself in Cincinnati last summer, conducting group therapy sessions for children stuck on a six-month waiting list at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.

“Before this summer I knew I wanted to do speech pathology, but there are a lot of fields,” she said. “[The Urban Leadership Internship Program] really helped me narrow it down.”

Although interning in a children’s hospital, Wellman had the opportunity to go to a rehab facility once a week where adults were receiving therapy to recover from a stroke. Inspired by their motivation to learn and improve, she decided adult therapy was the direction she hoped to head in the future.
Students do fascinating things during their professional internships, Egart said, however, “what’s most interesting are experiences that affect students and their development.”

Tiffany Gilmore, a 2001 Miami graduate, had one such experience. She participated in the program during the summer before her senior year. Studying literature and women’s studies at Miami, Gilmore worked in a housing project of Chicago’s South Side. She conducted literacy preparation classes for residents seeking out their GED and held creative writing workshops. Although the project was intended to help Chicago residents move from welfare to work, it inspired her as well.

“I was designing effective change,” she said, motivating her to make “an extended commitment to service learning.” Learning that service is part of a way of life rather than a required activity, Gilmore now sees an activity such as serving soup to the poor as an opportunity to learn and examine why the poor exist.

After graduation, Gilmore’s experience led her to teach about the impact of helping others while working at Miami’s Service Learning Office before deciding to get her doctorate at the University of California, Davis in English literature. Wellman also found that her service site taught her the value of people’s emotions— both of those inner-city individuals she worked with as well as her own. Working within an urban neighborhood for the Civic Garden Center of Greater Cincinnati, Wellman helped area youth and adults to create community gardens.

Wellman learned how to adjust to environments completely different from the one she was used to.

One day, she remembered, police drove through the neighborhood calling out the name of a suspect over the loud-speaker. One of the children working in the garden casually mentioned that the name belonged to his brother, and continued to dig. Wellman, while feeling shocked, knew she needed to keep calm and continue with her work so as not to excite the other children.

The Urban Leadership Internship Program promotes an experience in which students explore a new environment, new situations and new feelings.
Although the internship occurs during ten weeks in the summer, the experience continues to affect the lives of its participants well into the future. Much like Citino, many individuals confront stereotypes they don’t realize they have, clarify their career goals like Wellman or find in themselves a commitment to service like Gilmore.

With lessons learned and memories formed, the Urban Leadership Internship Program takes the average internship and transforms it into a life-changing experience.

all photos taken by Katie Egart

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