I had the privilege of getting to work as an extern this summer with the INL’s STEM Scholars Program. Although I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into initially, I can say that I am so grateful to have had an opportunity to spend my summer working with this program. There are so many benefits to participating in the externship program, but I wanted to take just a moment to go over the top 3 that were most important to me.

First, working as an extern provided me with opportunities to network with so many different educators and other professionals who I would not have crossed path with otherwise. Some of these people who were fellow teachers who helped pass along valuable teaching strategies and classroom management ideas to me from their many years of experience. While others are professionals who work for companies like the INL who are now friends of mine who are willing to help me out when it comes to writing grants for my classroom or securing extracurricular opportunities for students of mine. Meeting these people through the externship program will provide benefits for both myself and my students for many years to come.

Second, working as an extern provided me with daily opportunities throughout the summer to practice working on my classroom management skills in a “live” setting. As a teacher who is still fairly new to teaching in the classroom, these opportunities provided me with invaluable time in front of students that I wouldn’t have received elsewhere over the course of my summer break. The reality of the fact is that one can read as many books and watch as many videos as you want to on subjects like classroom management, but there is no replacement for practicing those skills in front of real live students. Being able to workshop different ideas and techniques that I had been wanting to possibly implement into my own classroom during the school year in a more low pressure environment like the STEM Scholars summer camp was so beneficial to me. I can already tell that it is having a positive effect on the way I am teaching the students in my own classroom so far for this school year.

Third, working as an extern provided me with an opportunity to grow and learn as a student myself too. A lot of the different lessons and activities that I was a part of during the STEM Scholars camp were outside my content area. While I initially thought this might be too much of a challenge for me, the student inside of me quickly became excited and enthralled with the various things that I would get to learn and experience alongside the students I was teaching during the course of the summer. Before STEM Scholars, I was a music teacher who had little to no experience with things like computer science, robotics, and coding, but after having completed my externship this summer, I am a music teacher who knows how to code, can do some basic programming with robots, and more. While I am still not 100% sure how this relates to me and the work I do in my band classroom, I am excited that I had opportunities to expand upon the knowledge I have in my own brain now. If nothing else, I feel like I can serve as a much better advocate for the other teachers I work with at my school and how important STEM is to the students we work with every day here in our school.

In conclusion, I would highly encourage any teachers who are interested in learning more about the summer externship program to pursue the opportunity. The benefits I went over here are only a few of the many different positive experiences I had during my work with the INL and their STEM Scholars camp. There are also so many different avenues and opportunities for teachers to pursue when it comes to the externship program. Working with the INL is only one of countless opportunities that are available to you out there. I can almost guarantee that there is something for everyone out there, no matter what content area you teach in or what subject(s) appeal to you. Do some digging, find out about all of the different opportunities available to you, and interview for anything that sounds of interest to you. The worst they can do is tell you “no.” When you find the right fit for you though, all of that work will be more than worth it. I can definitely attest to that from personal experience.