Officially an AmeriCorps member!

Yesterday was our official swearing-in as AmeriCorps members. All the members from my house, the Bourne house and the fire crew met at the County Complex and stood on the steps in front of the main building, as you can see in the picture above. We introduced ourselves to the County Commissioners (I think that's who they were) and then all said the AmeriCorps pledge as a group, which means that we are now officially members of AmeriCorps.

After that, we had an orientation with our IP service partners, or the people we will be working with for our Individual Placements. The way the program is set up, we have two days a week where we do service projects as a group, one day a week where we're in the AmeriCorps office working on planning projects and outreach events, and then the other two days are for our IPs. We indirectly got to choose our IPs because we were given a binder that listed all the choices and gave information about each, and then we got to rank them based on which ones we wanted the most. I was one of the people who ended up getting my first choice which was awesome, and I'm going to be working with the Cape Cod National Seashore Planning Department. It's mostly going to be office work, but that's what I wanted because our group projects are going to be all outdoor so I wanted to have a balance between office and field work. The main reason I was interested in this placement is because I've become interested in environmental policy recently and this placement involves learning more about that and how environmental issues are dealt with at the federal level, so I think I'm going to learn a lot of useful things that might help me figure out what I want to do as a career in the future. At this point I think I want to do some sort of environmental work so I'm hoping this year will help me narrow down exactly what shape that will take for me.