Midway Through My Internship With Planned Parenthood

I am halfway through my internship with Planned Parenthood, and I have already seen myself progress and grow so much! My supervisors have continued giving me projects with increasing importance, and I have been getting the hang of what needs to be done for things to run smoothly. My boss has been so incredible and has turned into an excellent mentor for me. I am thankful every day I come into work that I get the pleasure of working with such a fantastic woman.

I have been growing as a professional by learning a new person’s name every day and challenging myself to remember everyone in the office. I met the CEO and had a very pleasant interaction with her, which only solidified my love for the internship. She makes it a priority to get to know everyone in the office, even the interns who are only around for the summer like me. I have learned from her that everyone’s job matters and she outwardly appreciates everyone who works for her and treats them with the same respect no matter who they are.

Right now I am very proud to have been given the task of rebranding and creating a new slideshow for our lobby. I follow a strict brand book for the powerpoint and have been adding in many facts that would be important to ease patients nerves as well as to answer some of their questions while they wait in our lobby. I have been able to learn some hard skills like Canva and Photoshop while making these slides and will be able to carry these with me into my academics as well as my future jobs. These slides will be shown in our health centers in DC as well as in Maryland and Virginia. When I presented my finished product, I was happy to see that my feedback was positive and that my hard work paid off.

Planned Parenthood has strengthened my leadership skills. We get new volunteers every week, and I am usually tasked with delegating tasks for them as well as showing them how we do things in our day to day work. These tasks could be building birth control educator kits, tabling at an event, giving out swag, or rallying at the supreme court. I feel empowered every single day and am reminded of how beautiful it is to be a female. There was a time when women couldn’t vote or work, and although we still have some ways to go toward equality and complete control over our bodies without judgment, it has been a beautiful and empowering journey. I can only look back and hope that I can continue the work that the women of the 1920s started so they would look back at this and be proud of all that women have accomplished.