Cheryl Smith '10
Major: International relations
Minor: Spanish
Hometown: Grapevine, Texas
Tell us about an internship you have held as an Agnes Scott student.
I worked under the research library director at the Southern Center for International Studies in Atlanta as an intern during the spring 2009 semester. The Southern Center creates educational materials (books and DVDs) about different regions of the world for middle and high school students. They also help put on various programs for students and business professionals.
What were you able to accomplish in your internship?
My main task was to fact check the written material used by the Southern Center to produce their books and DVDs. I found sources to support their preliminary drafts of information. If I couldn’t find anything to support their facts, we had to determine if the information in question was false or not or, if we could, bypass the issue by rewording a sentence or two.
As an intern, I also helped the Southern Center with a few of the programs they sponsored. For example, I created the questions for and worked at the Metro Atlanta WorldQuest competition. WorldQuest quizzes students about current events and other topics. The winning team went on to Washington, D.C., for the national competition.
The Southern Center also co-sponsored a business luncheon that included a panel of three global financial experts talking about the economic crisis. I gathered and organized information for a background information packet, covering the main topics that we expected to address, for the moderator of that panel.
How will your internship experience help you in the future?
My internship helped me develop my research and analytical skills. I had to quickly familiarize myself with new academic journals and the databases of various international organizations.
The key skill I took from this internship was the ability to read through articles and data and determine if the information related to claims I was trying to support. Fact checking can easily become frustrating, but now I am better able to analyze information and assertions, not just in readings for class, but also in things I write. Ultimately, this will help me produce better work, both in my academic career and in future jobs.