Writing: Sometimes not as easy as it seems

Although we were only in Brussels for two months instead of the original plan of four, I still think that my abilities grew more than I expected them to over such a short period of time. My position as the policy and communication assistant at the Lifelong Learning Platform is an experience that I will never take for granted.

Within the first few weeks of living in Brussels, I knew that I wanted to improve my ability of professional knowledge application. This strength comes from taking something that you have already learned previously and applying it into a new context. In my previous blogs, I have talked a lot about becoming a teacher and the opportunities I have received through my education classes. I think that I have forgotten to mention that I am in fact a history major as well.

At Furman, I am studying to be a high school history teacher. This means that I am a history major while taking all the education classes as well so that I can graduate with my certification to teach high school history in South Carolina. While being a history major, I have spent much time researching and writing essays on certain historical events. Because of the vast amount of papers I have had to write for my history classes, I consider myself a pretty good writer when I am writing an analytical piece. I am able to come up with my argument and then write more paragraphs explaining my thesis in great detail.

I was able to use this research and writing skill in my internship this semester. Since I was part of the policy team, I was able to help out with the educational policy research. I helped write our monthly newsletters to our member organizations, where I was able to prove why the MFF budget was not high enough. I was able to analyze why learning can take place in different environments and see the effect that intergenerational learning has on each person involved. I thrived when I was able to prove my point with concrete evidence.

The only bad part about being a good analytical writer is that I am poor at synthetic or unsystematic writing. Prior to this semester, I never really found myself being required to write about topics without having to prove my point to an intended audience. My lack of skill in this department made some aspects of my internship a bit more challenging for me. For example, I was working with my director on planning our workshop for the European Civil Society Days. For an upcoming meeting, I had to write a statement where I was not required to make the reader agree with my opinion. I found this quite difficult and the short statement took me much longer to write than I would like to admit.

I was able to use professional knowledge application in Brussels with the writing and research skills that I had already learned throughout my previous three years at Furman. This ability helped me succeed in particular areas of my internship. Going forward, I hope to use this same technique to improve my unsystematic writing, which I learned much more about through casual writing this semester.

This blog post was about one ability that I managed to work on and improve due to my experience in Brussels. I could sit here writing for days if I had to cover all of the different skills and abilities that I managed to develop those two months. I have said it before and I will most definitely say it again, those two months in Brussels consisted of the most breathtaking and intriguing moments of my entire life.