Annie Partika ’15 (a psychology major and education minor from Youngstown, Ohio) worked for a program called Literary Lots during the summer of 2013. She describes the mission of her internship as “turning an underutilized lot in Cleveland into a children’s storybook come to life as a site for educational programming and community events.”
The internship began, however, with Annie working almost completely alone in an unfamiliar city. Annie regularly received instructions from her boss, but she was away on a business trip in Europe — and there were no other Literary Lots employees in Cleveland. Annie’s jobs ranged from holding sponsorship meetings with local business owners, whom she’d never met, to probing thrift shops for used furniture to decorate the lot. After her boss returned from Europe three weeks into the internship, Annie’s tasks stabilized slightly, and her job mostly included managing the lot and planning community events.
Annie’s on-campus experiences as an ARCH guide and a member of WAC (the Wooster Activities Crew) made her a competitive candidate for this internship, which related to both her interest in event planning and her education minor. In an APEX blog about her experience, Annie wrote, “When a child enters the Literary Lot, the community and literary world combine and provide an escape while also maintaining real world engagement in the Ohio City community.”
By Madeleine O’Neill ’16