Another Ally Monday

We have been asked to write a brief blog entry on "the day in the life of an Ally," and so I thought I'd hop on here and tell y'all what my day has been like so far.

I work at YO:Durham (Year of Opportunity for Durham Teens), where I coordinate career internship placements for our program participants, all at-risk high school students between 15 and 17 years old. This morning I have a follow-up site visit with one of our students who is a senior GED student at Durham Tech. She is working directly under one of the department managers at BlueCross & BlueShield of North Carolina, and has been doing a stellar, professional job. From the very beginning of her placement her supervisors began discussing the possibility of hiring her full-time upon completion of her internship. Needless to say, this follow-up visit, which I do for every intern about 1 month after the initial entrance interview, is pretty short and painless. I sit down with the student and her supervisor and we go through the goals we'd set at the entrance interview, making sure that she is progressing on each of them and that the student-supervisor relationship is going well. I take a couple of photos of the student at her desk and with her supervisors, and then head back to the office.

After logging my mileage and a quick email check, it is time to head up to the City of Medicine Academy, where five YO:Durham students attend high school. The YO:Durham staff is buying them all lunch (Chick-Fil-A) so we can meet with them to discuss their academics and their progress in the YO:Durham program components (mentorship, internship, service-learning). We cram into a small conference room and break out the chicken sandwiches and fries. It is a pretty rowdy bunch--we spend most of the time joking and laughing, and the check-ins happen on the fly in the last 5-minutes before they have to run back to class. All of these students are pulling good grades and are showing up for their internships, so we had no major issues to talk about, anyways.

After stopping by the guidance office to pick up their report cards from last semester, we all head back to the office again, where I begin catching up on emails and processing a few time cards that came in by fax over the weekend. This is a big part of my job: making sure all of the interns get their time cards in on time, along with the required journal entry for each pay period. If either of these is missing, the student cannot get paid on time, and this sometimes causes "issues" (the students nicknamed me Mr. OG on the first day, and I fear I've gradually lived up to my name...). For the student interns, this is a taste of the real world of work, and over the past several months they have been slowly getting used to filling out a time card and knowing when the pay period ends so they can get it signed and faxed on time. They like getting a paycheck every two weeks, and so this has been a good motivator.

Right now, I have a pretty slow afternoon until 4pm, when I will be meeting with another student and her guardian to discuss now we can support her through the upheaval of changing foster homes. After that meeting, I will probably head home at around 5...