Grace Jones

Responsibilities

During my internship I was tasked with creating resources for youth ranging from teens to college students and young adults. I researched topics on mental health, substance use, problem gambling, and suicide among younger generations too create helpful resources for learning and self reflection. I also helped to fill orders that came in to Your Life Iowa for places that were in need of our free materials like toolkits, brochures, business cards, etc. Lastly I attended local conferences like the Drug Endangered Children's Conference and talked about Your Life Iowa's services with attendees.

Accomplishments

My greatest accomplishment during my internship was creating a mental health and substance use toolkit for college students in the state of Iowa. The toolkit provides students with self reflective practices as well as learning to hopefully educate them on these topics. We are hoping to get this toolkit distributed across universities in Iowa to bring awareness to difficult topics that don't get talked about often enough.

Learning experience

The greatest lesson learned was from my internship supervisor, he told me to make sure you go into this field for the right reasons. We all want to help people in this field but you can't tie your success to the success of clients, otherwise you'll never feel fulfilled or get burnt out. Its impossible to force people to want to get better so making sure you don't enter the field trying to "fix people."

What advice would you give?

Advice I have for future students in Human Development and Family Studies would be to go into your internship with an open mind you'll learn a lot not only about this field but about professionalism in general. I would also say to practice patience especially when working with people because it can be easy to get frustrated. Lastly, I would say to enjoy the experience and build good relationships with the people in your agency and outside of your agency because you never know where you might end up.