Post 6: Challenges: Reflect upon the challenges that you had during your internship and how you overcame those challenges.

The first challenge that I faced this summer was figuring out how to get to my internship. CityClub is nestled in the heart of downtown Seattle. As the city has grown in population and popularity, traffic has become so bad that infuriatingly locked gridlock is now inevitable at peak hours. Furthermore, even if you were able to defeat the ubiquitous traffic, parking a car in downtown Seattle for the day costs a lot of money.

I've become a very creative commuter. I've gotten to work using every method of transportation on offer: carpools, buses, my bike, my skateboard, and my own two feet are all fair game and have all played their part in making sure that I am always where I need to be when I need to be there. At this point, six weeks in, I have it all figured out.

The next challenge that I have faced is balancing my work commitment with my desire to spend as much time as possible with my friends and family. My dad, especially, has a lot of grand ideas for hikes that he and I should do, sports that we need to play, and (most problematically) family vacations that he sees no reason why I should not go on. He seems to think that my work is merely optional, and can be skipped frequently and without a backwards glance.

To overcome this hurdle, I have had to do some introspection and justify to myself and my father why I am committed to my internship at Seattle CityClub. I love hiking, I love sports, and I love family vacations. But, I have committed myself to an eight week internship with CityClub, and that is a commitment that is important to me for a whole bunch of reasons, I discovered. I think that so far I've done well to have an extremely fun, family-filled, and active summer while not compromising my commitment to CityClub.

Finally, it is never easy when I am assigned menial tasks involving excel spreadsheets and/or a lot of paper. These tasks do not seem like the best use of my time, and they are always onerous. However, I am lucky that CityClub does not assign me all too many of these tasks, and I also recognize that somebody has to do them, so it may as well be me. While it is never easy to buckle down and do the busywork, I always get it done.