For the past month, our U.S. team has been very grateful to have additional support from our virtual intern, Ella Stux. Ella is a graduating senior at the Madeira School in McLean, Virginia who completed the internship as a part of the school’s Co-Curriculum Program. Ella supported the team by developing social media content, organizing data about Uganda’s education system, and building a database of academic and news articles about education in Uganda that our staff and partners can use as resources.
On her last day with the team, Ella answered some questions from Diana Winter, our Associate Director of Program Strategy and Evaluation (also a Madeira graduate) about her experience and her goals moving forward. Here’s a snippet of the conversation!
Diana: What is something that you’ve learned in the past few weeks that really impacted you?
Ella: I guess I’ve realized how challenging it can be to make education work well. Uganda has a lot of different challenges they are trying to solve, and in the United States there are a lot of problems in our schools. It is cool to see the similarities and differences.
Diana: So, what have you learned from this experience that you are going to take with you to college?
Ella: I think more curiosity, honestly, because you don’t know the things that you don’t know. I’ve realized there are a lot of things about the world that I don’t know and now I can put a name to some them. A lot of things were presented to me over the past few weeks that I wouldn’t have necessarily sought out myself, but having a chance to learn about them has made me curious to know more about other things that I haven’t been exposed to yet.
Diana: Awesome! I think that’s a beautiful sentiment.
From everyone at Elevate, thanks for your support, Ella. Congratulations on your graduation this past weekend and good luck at the University of Georgia next year!