My name is Steven Hendrix. I am a freshman at Bennington College, and we're here at Google. I was lucky enough to come here for my field work term to work in cross advertiser user experience.
And we are in the control room of Studio 360, which is a podcast about the arts and culture here at WNYC in New York.
I'm working on an oral history project and narrative collecting. I'm going straight to the community, uplifting their voice, and presenting a platform in which their voices could be heard.
I knew next to nothing about neuroscience before my first field work term here. I've kind of learned it all on the job.
I always tell field work term students, "Go and throw yourself into everything and find the areas that you're most interested in."
I was initially very nervous when I got here, like kind of at the bottom of the food chain of this institution, but that's not how I've been treated at all. I've been treated as a student, as someone who has a lot to learn, but who is not stupid.
And so we want to make sure that what they're coming away with is some sort of knowledge or skill set that will serve them well, more broadly speaking.
I just realized after working for the luthiers at the Brooklyn Lutherie, that there was so much skill, and so much time was needed in order to develop that skill. I realized that if I really wanted to kind of pursue this as a career, I needed to try making investments, time investments.
For interns, I want to give them an idea of the system. Here's why something like this is important, because it feeds into this, which feeds into that, which is absolutely essential for the running of the organization.
The best part of my field work terms in government have been learning that I'm already prepared or comfortable in a legislative environment, where things are chaotic, and things change from day to day.
It's also, I think, at this point helped inform moreso how my work at Bennington can be done, as opposed to when I got in here, I thought field work term would be a complete supplement to my studies. I think they definitely go hand in hand by now,
When you're trying to become an expert in your field, the way you do that is just by immersing yourself in your field.
It also gives the students the ability to really have a project that simulates what goes on in real life. So we always do a project where I'll actually give the students an assignment that a startup company might have, a challenge that is in the business, and actually have them go through the entire process of looking at, you know, who are our users, what are their lives like, what are their pain points, and how can we design a product that's compelling to them.
The big thing here is that I'm doing science. This isn't playing, this isn't like doing an established experiment in a class for the experience of doing the techniques or whatnot. When I collect data, I'm collecting data that is going to contribute to a paper that's published.
This is really being hands on and implementing a practice and using it at a different organization and seeing how it can inform my own work. All these skills are so vital.
It started as a sort of side interest. And I just kind of grew more and more invested in trying to make it something that I could be good at. I knew that I'd have to spend time doing it. It couldn't just be a two month internship. It had to be something that I followed up on and continued.
I think through working in a finance department and through being a legislative intern, I'm certainly setting up the qualifications for a role in government. I love working in government.
All of this cutting edge research with these cutting edge instruments. I think you can't really get that anywhere else.
