Intern Spotlight: Sabrina Pines
Special thanks to Learning Life intern, Ehvyn McDaniels, for helping to draft Sabrina’s profile.
Hailing from sunny and beautiful La Jolla, California (we’re jealous!), Learning Life summer intern Sabrina Pines is a George Washington University student with a penchant for helping people.
This penchant has taken many forms, but starts with her family. “Coming from a big Persian and Jewish family, I have learned the importance of making time for family no matter how busy I may be.” She has for several years worked in her family’s law and jewelry businesses, and helps prepare healthy family meals at home. Beyond her family, Sabrina has assisted children at a preschool; fundraised for and engaged toddlers and teenagers diagnosed with mental and physical disabilities; counseled pre-teens in summer camps; aided patients at a surgical center; fundraised to send medical supplies to developing nations; and helped carry out medical research at a hospital. Throughout, Sabrina has greatly enjoyed “meeting and conversing with different people, helping those in need, and working as a problem solver.”
Sabrina is currently majoring in psychology at George Washington University. For many years, her penchant to help people inclined her to become a doctor. Yet Sabrina’s coursework at GWU and her experiences working at a hospital and surgical center turned her on to organizational psychology as a means to empower organizations to achieve their goals, and help their customers, employees and communities.
Interning with Learning Life this summer from her home in La Jolla, Sabrina helped gather well more than one hundred Twitter-sized “tweets” (messages of 140 characters or less) on everything from sleep disorders to the birthdays of famous U.S. and world figures past and present, each with a link to more information online for further learning. Learning Life disseminates 2-4 messages via our social media pages on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin seven days a week. Most of these messages are educational, whether they be facts or questions inviting readers to learn more via our quizzes, five facts, or big questions pages on Learning Life’s website, or at other educational sites on the internet. All this educational content takes time to research, draft and edit, so we are thankful to have volunteers and interns like Sabrina to help.
Sabrina also helped increase Learning Life’s Facebook likes, gathered notable quotes about learning, and researched facts about the D.C. metro area in preparation for Learning Life’s (former) “Weekly Learn” email offering D.C. area residents a free way to learn something about the history, economy, politics or demographics of their metropolitan community every week.
When she’s not studying or helping others, Sabrina enjoys cooking, playing tennis and piano. Every year from 2000 to 2012, she participated in a piano competition of the National Piano Guild that required memorizing and performing challenging classical music pieces before a judge. Her excellence in those competitions over the years led her to win the Guild’s coveted Paderewski Medal and a scholarship.
Asked why she decided to volunteer with Learning Life, Sabrina responded, “I decided to work for Learning Life because I believe the public needs to be educated on important facts to gain knowledge about world problems that have occurred in the past and present day. Learning Life is so accessible and provides simple, clear statements that any person at any place on the map can understand to form an opinion and use that information to debate, evaluate, and/or reflect on. I also wanted to be a part of an organization that would teach me something new every day to better myself personally, academically, and professionally.”
Sabrina’s research for Learning Life this summer helped us all learn some new and interesting things on varied topics from health to history, and for that we are grateful. Look for some of Sabrina’s interesting facts on our Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin pages in the weeks and months ahead!
To learn more about interning or volunteering with Learning Life, contact us at email@learninglife.info.