13 Jul Challenges and Overcoming Them – Daniella Castillo Vásquez

Like many of us might have, I joined the workforce when I was sixteen. What followed was a series of retail, food, and other services jobs that I did because I needed to but that never truly challenged me. Having a full-time office job was something I had never done and began experiencing with this internship. During the weeks I have been working with the Olmsted Center For Landscape Preservation, the thing I have done the most is learning. I have learned to communicate with others, I have become better at writing professionally, and, most importantly, I am continuously researching incredible places and the people that once lived there. There have also been many challenges. It is easy to be hard on oneself when tasked with important things such as historic preservation, or any new task, for that matter. I have been writing consistently since I was a child, so I might have believed that this experience would not be difficult in terms of writing. Boy, was I mistaken. Writing for government entities looks very different from an essay, a research paper, or a short story, and it has been a big learning curve. But as the weeks have gone by, I have learned to transform my frustration into productivity, and with the help of my supervisor and the amazing team at OCLP, recognize that we are creating a new standard for how these pieces must be written.

With this, what I am trying to say, is that I am always trying to recognize and honor the fact that I truly am learning so much about this country’s parks and their history, the people I am working with, but above all, I have learned a lot about who I am as a worker, how to handle my frustrations, how to remain productive, how to ask for help and advice. I believe that by the end of this experience, I will be better at all those things that challenged me.