Spring is in the Air!

It’s crazy to think about, but we’re already more than halfway done with our semester in Chicago! On the one hand it seems like Orientation just happened a few weeks ago, but on the other hand I think we’ve all reached the point where even though we know there’s a lot of the city we haven’t seen, we certainly feel like we know it enough to not feel like tourists anymore.

Things slowed down a lot at my internship after our last deadline. Working at a magazine is a different experience for me, because up to this point all of my journalism work has been for newspapers or websites, where your deadlines are very immediate. At a magazine that only comes out once a month, though, there’s a lot more breathing room as far as writing articles goes. I still have tight deadlines for writing online stories, but it’s nice to be in an atmosphere that’s a little more relaxed than what I’m used to.

When you’re a general student in the Chicago Semester program, you participate in something called practicum group. Your practicum group meets once a week on Wednesdays and has a lot to do with your internship. Each practicum group also visits one of Chicago’s neighborhoods during the semester as a way of getting us out of the Loop (downtown Chicago) so we can experience different parts of the city. Last week, my practicum group went to North Lawndale. North Lawndale has been through a lot, especially since the 1960s when riots after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death destroyed much of the commercial area in the neighborhood. The population of the neighborhood dropped by about 67 percent between 1960 and 2000. When we visited North Lawndale, though, my practicum group spent time with Lawndale Christian Development Corporation, and organization that has done incredible things to revitalize the community. It really was an inspiring experience to see everything LCDC is doing in North Lawndale.

This past weekend was a pretty active one for me. On Friday, a bunch of us went to the Bulls game against the Hawks. I had never been to an NBA game before, so it was pretty surreal to actually see people like Derrick Rose, Joakim Noah and others whose names I’ve seen in the paper playing basketball. The next day the Bulls celebrated the 20th anniversary of their first NBA Championship, so a few players from the 1991 team including Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant were also in the audience. On Saturday one of my roommates and I decided to get out of our apartment and explore the city. Chicago celebrated St. Patrick’s Day on Saturday, so there were a ton of people around town. We opted for a trip to the Garfield Park Conservatory to get away from the tourists for a bit. It was an absolutely beautiful place and a great reminder that spring is coming! We decided to be a little tourist-y ourselves that night by going to Ed Debevic’s for dinner and then to Navy Pier to watch the St. Patrick’s Day fireworks. It may have been cold, but it was a lot of fun.