Turning the Page: A Social Work Intern at Public Libraries

My name is Jacklyn Wintersheimer, and I am the BSW intern at Kenosha Public Library for only a few more weeks. Throughout my two semesters, I have gone on outreach visits to correctional centers, crisis centers, and educational centers to spread awareness of what the library can do for people of all backgrounds (and the love of reading itself). I have created bookshelves with community, state, and federal resources regarding a plethora of different topics such as low-income housing, mental health support, drug and tobacco usage, and more. I have worked on a virtual library, expanding my bookshelves' resources to even more, including websites and links to programs, services, and more.

In the spring of my junior year, a library social worker came to talk to one of our classes right before we started digging into our internship options.

Afterwards, my professor told me she saw the lightbulb go off in my head.

She said that my eyes grew brighter, and that if I wasn’t going to be a library social worker forever, she knew I would at least do my senior internship at one of the two library placement options we had… She was undeniably correct, and I wouldn’t change it for anything.

At the Kenosha Public Library

For most of the first semester of my senior year, I was filled with an overwhelming sense of impostor syndrome. I didn’t have “actual” clients. I wasn’t seeing anybody regularly like most of my cohort, and I thought I was doing something wrong. I felt I wasn’t doing as much as my classmates and wasn’t doing my best. I felt “behind.”

One piece of advice that helped me is to do the things that feel hard. Take the internship with no on-site social worker as your direct supervisor.

Do the internship at the mezzo and macro levels, where you might not have many direct clients.

It is hard, but in the end, it is so rewarding. Seeing things disappear from the resource bookshelves means that people have access to the resources they need while they might not feel comfortable talking in person or maybe aren’t there at the same time as you. Keep doing what you are doing.

BY JACKLYN WINTERSHEIMER