Amanda's Internship Experience

Throughout this semester, my last semester before earning a bachelor’s degree, I had the incredible opportunity to work as an intern for the Arizona Hemophilia Association. I first began working here in the summer as a Bayer Hemophilia Leadership Development Program intern. When school started and my time with Bayer ended, I got the chance to continue my work and receive college credit as well. This internship has been much different because I moved back to Tucson for school and worked primarily from home. If you have ever worked from home, you know how challenging it can be to stay focused! However, by keeping contact with everyone at the AHA office and traveling to Phoenix for various events, I was able to work on numerous projects to keep busy.

This little guy was at my desk every day to help me stay focused!

Some of my biggest accomplishments this semester have been successfully organizing a camp program, creating a blog, and putting on two events here in Tucson. At Camp HUG, I was in charge of the family challenge on the last day and it was very fun! I had been planning it out for a few weeks prior to camp and was nervous about getting it to run smoothly, but all of the camp staff helped me out. It turned out to be a lot of fun; we even made a “haunted cave” for the families to go through at the end.

Another project I worked on was the Arizona Hemophilia Association blog. If you have not seen it, you can check it out at hemophiliaz.blogspot.org. I learned about how to design a blog and maintain the content on it. It can be difficult to find stories to write about or pictures to make it interesting. I hope we can continue it update it with community stories in the future.

In addition to these projects, I also worked on outreach in Tucson by organizing two local events. One of them was a women’s craft party. Although it was exciting for me to plan, not a lot of people showed up in the end. Fortunately, we were still able to have fun and made some cool Halloween crafts. I learned that sometimes things don’t happen exactly how you plan them, but you can still make the best of any situation.
You can see our crafts here.

I am happy to say that the second Tucson event had more people. Funnily enough, it was also easier to plan! We got some families together at Agua Linda Farm’s Fall Festival and had a fun evening of corn mazes, petting zoos, and Charlie Brown on the farm. It was a great feeling to see families having fun at an event I had put together.

Overall, my experience working with the AHA has been phenomenal. I am happy to have gotten to know so many people in the office and our community. I know I will use the skills I have gained in future jobs and hope I can spread the spirit of this community to others as well.

My awesome supervisor and mentor, Jessica