Intern Profile: Ehvyn McDaniels
Thanks to Learning Life intern, Dimitra Rallis, for helping to write Ehvyn McDaniel’s profile.
“Carpe diem” (“seize the day” in Latin) should be Learning Life summer intern, Ehvyn McDaniels’ official motto. A rising senior at Georgetown University, Ehvyn is majoring in sociology, minoring in psychology and French, working to improve the lives of children, and dancing with a passion in the United States and abroad.
A native of Duluth, Minnesota, Ehvyn has spent her last three years at Georgetown seizing growth opportunities of all kinds. Besides maintaining a 3.5 GPA overall and a 4.0 in her sociology major, she has served as a research assistant studying the history of law, an academic peer advisor for incoming first-year students, an outreach coordinator for the Georgetown University Dance Company, a volunteer organizer with Relay for Life, and an active member of the Georgetown Speechwriting Advisory Group and Adelfi, an all-women social group aiming to connect undergraduate women and powerful female figures in various walks of life.
Last fall, Ehvyn studied abroad in Sydney, Australia at the University of New South Wales to explore a country she knew little about. While in Australia, she fell in love with everything about the country, and seized an opportunity to dance. “I have been dancing since I was three and it is a huge part of my life,” Ehvyn explains. “While I was abroad I tried out for the New South Wales dance team, got accepted, and so was also able to dance competitively in a foreign country halfway across the world, which was really exciting.” That fall, the New South Wales dance team won the national competition.
Prior to working with Learning Life this summer, Ehvyn fostered a passion for working with children. Throughout her high school years, she worked with infants and toddlers as a teacher’s assistant in a daycare, where she organized a number of activities designed to develop basic motor skills and constructive interaction. In her time at Georgetown, she has taught Pre-K at Shaw Public Charter School, an inner city school in Washington, D.C. As Ehvyn describes it, her experience at Shaw has been “incredibly rewarding and eye-opening.” She explains that “It was rewarding to see pre-schoolers grow before my eyes, and eye-opening to see what they’re struggling with and what their lives are like at home.” Ehvyn plans to continue working with children in her career either as a family therapist or as a teacher.
Learning Life’s mission to inform and empower more people by spreading knowledge on everyday surfaces, drew Ehvyn to intern with us this summer. As she explains in keeping with her passion for helping kids, “there are far too many children who fall through the cracks of our nation’s education system, and as a result face an extreme disadvantage. By working with Learning Life to spread free knowledge, I am working to reduce the education gap and empower others.”
With Learning Life, Ehvyn has tackled a number of challenging projects, including gathering research and expert insights on two “Big Questions.” Learning Life’s Big Questions series, launched in 2013 with three Big Questions on terrorism, offers facts and resources as well as brief answers from experts on questions of broad public relevance. Ehvyn gathered evidence and reached out to experts for answers to two Big Questions: how and why is economic inequality increasing, and what can students do to get the most out of their education? In addition, Ehvyn has developed significant facts for social media dissemination, drafted several profiles of other Learning Life summer interns, helped grow our fan-base on Facebook, improved and expanded our database of potential fundraising sources, created a list of relevant educational websites, and co-produced inequality infographics (coming soon to our social media pages on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Pinterest!) with fellow intern, Dimitra Rallis. She did all these things with her characteristic cheerfulness and earnestness.
We fully expect Ehvyn will continue to seize the day, and in so doing, she will surely help make the world a better place for children.
To learn more about interning or volunteering with Learning Life, contact us at email@learninglife.info.