Name: Lindsey Foster
Class Year: 2016
Internship Placement: Rochester Branch of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Through this internship I am gaining a new perspective to working with children. I will be connecting with law enforcement and parents regarding ongoing missing children cases and helping to provide the resources that NCMEC can offer to them.
What’s happening? We’d love to hear how your internship is going.
My summer internship is with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at their New York branch in Rochester, NY. The organization has many different divisions that work with law enforcement organizations to help children in many different ways. The division I am working in, the Missing Children’s Division, helps law enforcement to find missing children. Most of the information about what I do day-to-day is confidential, however it has been an immensely rewarding experience and I have learned a lot about the organization and its effects as I’ve been here. I have also learned about myself and how I can best work in a team behind the scenes to benefit this population.
Niagara Falls is only about an hour and a half drive from Rochester so I took advantage of that on a weekend trip when my family came to visit.
Although the actual internship has been an incredible experience, it has also been both challenging and rewarding to live on my own for the first time in my life. I came to Rochester knowing no one in the city, nothing about the city, and never having lived on my own before. Cooking for myself has been an adventure and a great learning process – trying to figure out what food to purchase that I can actually eat before it goes bad – and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed exploring and getting to know the greater Rochester area. There has probably been at least one festival every weekend since I’ve been here – from the Xerox International Jazz Festival to the Corn Hill Arts Festival to Fairport Canal Days – all of which have been fun to check out. The public market in Rochester is incredible – it’s an enormous farmers market with fresh food at great prices that I go to almost every Saturday. Every part of this experience has been rewarding and has taught me a lot about myself, making me much more comfortable with the prospect of living on my own permanently in less than a year.