Week 1 at National Zoological Park (Richard)

This first week at the National Zoological Park has been amazing! I am working with the Friends of the National Zoo (FONZ) in the Department of Education and Volunteer Services (DEVS) office. I'm going to break this down by day to day because instead of doing one specific task, my supervisor has me doing lots of different things each day to get exposure so I can learn lots! 
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Monday: I got to walk around the zoo a little bit to familiarize myself with the location and get to see some of the animals. I was also instructed to look at the events that were taking place in the zoo as well as the work the teen volunteers did. 
Tuesday: I just did my HR orientation all day so I got to learn about the mission of the zoo and a lot of the background behind it. They gave us a tour of the zoo so now by the end of Tuesday I actually knew the zoo really well. We also learned how to deal with visitors and some of the things they might ask and what we would have to say. 

Wednesday: This was my longest day of 12 hours. But it wasn't because they forced me to stay I just wanted to stay to listen to some of the meetings. But this day was when I did a lot of interpreter training, which are the people who talk to visitors more specifically about the animals in the enclosures. In addition to interpreter training, I was able to be a part of their facebook live series, where I just held a white board for 2 minutes and then sat back down, but it was still an awesome experience to be able to see how they do their live broadcasts. I will actually be a part of them for the following weeks so go ahead and check out the National Zoological Park facebook page and be on the look out for me doing some pretty cool stuff. I'll likely be doing crafts that relate to the animal they were discussing on the live broadcast, but anyways I got sidetracked. The end of the day was when I listened to the dieting meeting on how the animals are feed so that was really cool to see how calculated everything is. 

Thursday: In the morning I got to work with some toddlers before they went to see the otters, so I helped them do some crafts and play with them. I then did some more training on conservation and Minors Policies, and finished the day helping out with more kids in the zoo's aftercare. I also found out that I will be reading zoo-related books to audiences of english and spanish speaker at the zoo, so I am looking forward to that!

Friday: Today, I helped organize the zoo guides into their groups, then helped plan for outreach events that will take place over the next couple months. It was a lot of brainstorming!

I am looking forward to keep helping plan some of these outreach events geared for kids, teens, and adults, as well as taking part in the facebook lives. I also can't wait to read to children and get them interested and engaged with animal conservation!

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