Ms. Sophia Says Goodbye!
Ms. Sophia and Happiness Hour girls.
When I was applying to jobs during my senior year of college, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do next. I knew I was interested in education, psychology, writing, and women’s rights, but I didn’t think I would be able to find anything that would allow me to explore all these different areas at once. Then I heard about the Weitz Fellowship at Girls Inc. of Omaha. “Every day will be different,” I was told in my interview, and it was true. Over the past year I’ve had a huge variety of experiences through which I’ve been able to develop skills in all my interest areas and more.
Through my fellowship I have had the freedom to create multiple projects on my own. One of the most challenging yet rewarding projects I worked on this year was my Happiness Hour club for teens. I was a Psychology major in college, and I based my Happiness Hour club on a course in positive psychology that I took in my senior year. I wanted to be able to create a space where the teens could practice strategies for self-care and dealing with negative life events, and also discuss issues in their lives that are important to them. Although at first it was challenging, it was a valuable learning experience to be forced to apply what I had learned in a classroom setting to the real world. I was pushed to be creative in developing engaging activities for a younger age group and finding ways to make our club sessions interactive and hands-on. The club has been going on the whole school year, and it’s been so rewarding to see the same girls coming back each week and taking an active role in developing the club.
My favorite project to work on has been my Harry Potter book club for 4th and 5th graders. It was fun for me to introduce my favorite book series to girls for the first time and to see them get excited about getting sorted into their houses, making pom-pom owls, and trying Bertie Bott’s Every Flavored beans. Harry Potter inspired a lifelong love of reading for me, and I hope it does the same for the girls in my club.
Other projects that I worked on this year involved writing psychology lesson plans, teaching statistics to teens in a Giga Girl pilot project for Girls, Inc. national, and working with graduating seniors on scholarship essays. Through all of these experiences I’ve gotten a better sense of what I enjoy doing, where my skills lie, and how I can use my knowledge to help other people. I probably would not have been able to find another post-college job that would have given me so much freedom to explore my various interests. I’m still not sure what I want to do with my life, but I’ve gained much more information about myself and the world to help me make that decision.
Goodbye for now to Girls, Inc. and Omaha! I will miss my girls!
– Sophia Jenkins
