Meet our summer interns

We've got a great crew of interns this summer, courtesy of the Kohn Internship Program, and we'd love for you to meet them. Adam is working with the Leadership Development department, Paula has teamed up with the International Diller Teen Initiatives, and Gary has settled in with our Marketing department. Here's a little bit about them in their own words:

The JCF and Adam Berman are bashert

Adam Berman

Hi everyone, my name is Adam Berman, and I’m interning with the SF Jewish Community Federation this summer through a program called the Kohn Internship. While I’m from Marin, I decided to go to school a long way from home; I’m a sophomore at Dickinson College in Central Pennsylvania. I love it there, but it’s quite a bit different from what I’m used to in the Bay Area – for one thing, Dickinson’s right in the middle of Amish country. It took me a few weeks to adjust to horse-drawn carriages sharing the road with cars, but now it feels perfectly normal. I’m majoring in philosophy, I play for my college’s ultimate frisbee team (more about that later in the summer), I sing in an acapella group, and I do play by play and color commentary over the radio for my school’s baseball, basketball, and football teams. Even though I’m two hours from the nearest big city, I’m always busy. Why spend my time doing Kohn- an internship that requests 225 hours over eight weeks of summer vacation? A program that means that instead of watching tons of 30 Rock every Friday, I instead meet with my fellow interns and discuss what we’re working on, engage with leaders in the community, and learn important skills. Giving up so much of my precious summer break is quite a sacrifice, but I think it is bashert – meant to be. Earlier in the year, I had lined up a position with KNBR, the SF Giants radio station, as a production intern, but it fell through in mid-May. I was pretty certain I’d be spending my summer catching up on TV, but I sent out a couple resumes anyway. The people in charge of Kohn told me that even though I was about two months late in applying, I could interview and join the wait-list. When I went in to interview they informed me that a person had dropped from the program that day and that I could fill her spot. I’m now interning at the Jewish Community Federation in San Francisco! I knew next to nothing about the Federation going into the program, but working at a non-profit seemed infinitely better than flipping burgers at In-N-Out. This summer I’m working in the Leadership Development department, and over the next two months, I’ll be blogging about my experiences. Bye for now!

Paula Reves has a plan

Paula Reves

Hi, I’m Paula Reves! I am a rising sophomore at UC Davis, studying biological sciences and thinking about a minor in Jewish Studies. After college, I am planning on attending medical school and pursuing a career in neonatology. This coming school year I will be an Israel intern at Hillel, and I will continue teaching Sunday School and the local synagogue. I am the kind of person who has a plan for pretty much everything. People often ask, “what if things don’t go as planned? Then what will you do?” They are so silly, I probably already have plan B set into action. In my spare time, I enjoy reading, laughing, hanging out with my friends and rooting for the San Francisco Giants. While in Davis, I developed a new love, which none of my friends here appreciate, a love for country music. Let me tell you, I have jumped in head first; I even went to the Tim McGraw concert in June, which I can say was nothing like anything I had ever experienced before. If I am planning to be a doctor, why apply to the Kohn Internship when I should be working in a lab? I applied to the Kohn internship for a variety of reasons. I know someone who did the internship previously and had a positive experience. I also did the Jewish Family and Children’s Service YouthFirst Internship in high school, which is similar to the Kohn Internship, and had a positive experience with that. I was planning to come home for the summer, I wanted to see my friends so the location was a small detail. If I had looked for work in a lab job that may have meant staying in Davis which was not really part of the plan. I am an intern for the Diller Teen Initiatives here at the Jewish Community Federation.  My placement with the Diller Teen Initiatives has been good so far. I was a Diller Teen Fellow in 2009 so I had some idea of what I was getting myself into. I know about the program and I had already known a little bit about their other program that is part of the Diller Teen Initiatives.  I have been doing work with both of those programs, the Diller Teen Fellows program and the Diller Teen Tikkun Olam Awards. I don’t think that the job is a shocking difference from what I was expecting. It is nice that I have a little more freedom and ownership of my projects than I thought I may have been given.

Gary Podvalny's 'office space' experience

Gary Podvalny

My name is Gary Podvalny and I am currently an undergraduate student at the University of California, San Diego.  I am interning in the marketing department at the San Francisco-based Jewish Community Federation.  I heard about Kohn from a program director at Hillel that knew I was involved with a few startups and was looking for an “office space” experience.  She recommended Kohn because she had a friend that did the program and had a great time doing it. Last year I worked for an online marketing startup for six months that taught me a lot about the working world and online marketing as a whole.  The environment was intense to say the least, the hours were crazy and the tasks varied drastically.  I loved it.  I wanted to work in an office because I was curious to compare the differences in environment and I thought it would be good to show that I could work in both settings. I was a bit nervous coming to work because the day before I started all the interns were briefed by an HR person about what was “acceptable” in the work place.  She gave us this packet saying I couldn’t say this and I couldn’t do that; after reading through the packet I figured there was a good chance I was going to offend somebody.  The startup I worked for had nothing even remotely similar to this so I wasn’t sure how to deal with it.  But after meeting my supervisors and having a quick conversation where one or two Seinfeld references came up I had a feeling I would settle into the job nicely. Overall I thought this internship would be useful in learning and being exposed to different marketing techniques that could open me up to different opportunities.  I feel as if I’ve only touched the surface so far and am looking forward to the next couple of weeks where I can learn more from my supervisors.  The pace of work is also a factor that I am trying to get accustomed to; the office environment is not as relentless as a startup so I have more time to do research about the federation and the kinds of tools that are used to make the marketing department run. I see this internship as a great opportunity to learn about the work place and will do my best to soak in everything I can from the people around me.