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We’re expected to work with our community partner for 20 hours per week over two months, which is equivalent to one month of full-time employment. Based on my previous full-time experiences, after I start a new job, it takes a month for me to find my bearings. While I would like to have high expectations for what I can accomplish over the summer, realistically speaking, I anticipate that the project will end soon after I feel confident in what I’m doing.

This summer I hope to get approval from Solano Community College (SCC) and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), either through the Voluntary Education Program or the Office of Community Partnerships, to administer study hall and writing and math workshops for students in California State Prison, Solano. Both SCC and the CDCR have bureaucratic hurdles I need to clear, which is proving slower and more arduous that I had imagined.

During the past few months, my expectations for the summer Educators’ Workshop with Santa Cruz Shakespeare have been in constant flux, ranging from grand visions of what the project could be and do (i.e., lay the groundwork for a more robust arts education program at SCS and build lasting partnerships with local teachers and schools) to more concrete, immediate goals (i.e., what needs to be done this week in order to make the event happen).

Because of low accountability, grant funds in academia are sometimes given and projects begun only to sink silently like stones in a still pond. Because this will be my last funded graduate student project, and because I know more now than I knew when I began this long process of obtaining my PhD, I want my work this summer to get out into the world, to be read and seen and heard about and allowed to matter.

Many of my peers in this program are tackling summer projects that are an extension of their academic research, or of long-term passions volunteering in prisons or running educational programs in schools. My project dropped in my lap when my initial proposal for the Public Scholars program fell through—I had never even heard of Pond Farm until several months ago!

What can I do over the summer? As I’ve progressed through graduate school I have become increasingly aware of the fleetingness of those precious months between May and September, which always begin with grand plans of productivity that end up being significantly scaled down. My Public Scholar project will be no different, I imagine, and in an effort to curtail being overwhelmed and disappointed (and disappointing others), I am trying to set realistic goals.

I had not secured a community partner before embarking on the Mellon Public Scholars program, so I put a lot of thought into selecting and making connections with the Center for Genetics and Society in just a few weeks. After much research and several conversations, I’m now thrilled to have a diverse and robust list of projects to support and develop over the summer at CGS. Unfortunately, the ‘summer’ is only two months at half-time.

Once upon a time, I used to guide the development of workplans for AmeriCorps members. The plans needed to be clear lists of discrete and do-able tasks with outcomes that were measurable in some way. For many projects, the workplan provided a meaningful guide to an otherwise fuzzy three- or ten-month project. Over the years, I oversaw a few hundred workplans. I got a good idea of what panned out and what didn’t. So it is somewhat embarrassing that I now find writing my own workplan for a summer project so challenging.

School’s out for summer
School’s out forever
School’s been blown to pieces
-Alice Cooper

The question of what can be accomplished in a project of public scholarship over a summer is like asking what can be accomplished in a project of public scholarship, period.

By that I mean that the answer can be and should be: something can be accomplished. This claim is both grand and humble. School’s out forever. School’s out for summer.

While designing this outreach program, I have constantly had to remind myself that this workshop will only be seven to eight weeks long. Another important factor is that I will be working with middle school students, not college undergraduates. When designing the overall structure of the program, both of these constraints have proven to be challenges I need to overcome. I knew both of these factors conceptually, but it was only when I was sitting down to design the entire program that I saw how limiting these factors could be.