To start with...

Greetings from Boston!

I have been blogging for a while now about my many adventures in foreign countries (from my perspective, I understand I have a bit of an international following. Shout out to my friends from Korea, Romania, South Africa, Malaysia, Australia, Hong Kong, and Japan!) (www.kmowles.blogspot.com). Over the past year I spent most of my time traveling and having adventures in new places. This year I plan to stay close to home much more.

I am starting the year with a summer internship in Boston. It was difficult to find something while abroad, but after just the first week, I think I'm going to enjoy this new job. The organization is the Massachusetts Council on Compulsive Gambling (http://www.masscompulsivegambling.org/). It is a non-profit organization (my favorite type) that advocates for more attention to problem gambling, as well as running education and assistance programs.

My role is Public Awareness (so that the fact that you just went to the website to find out what the council is because you've never heard of it doesn't happen in the future). More specifically, I will be working on enhancing the social media strategy and helping improve other technology related areas of the organization (so essentially, my job is to use social media).

I got involved here through AmeriCorps summer internship program called New Sector (http://www.newsector.org/). I am a summer fellow, along with a cohort of something like 30-40 other individuals who are also helping non-profits around Boston in various capacities. They have been great from the start. While I was still abroad the director of the program was great at keeping me in the loop as to what was going on with the program. I met her in person for the first time yesterday, and she is equally nice in person. Meanwhile, the other fellows all seem really great (granted I haven't really gotten to know them that well yet, but I'm working on it).

Also exciting about being back in Boston? Reconnecting with friends and family. I got home right in time for my birthday and the Fourth of July, so I got to see pretty much everyone over the past week. Most of us still have so much to catch up on though!

Well, that's just a preview of what I'll be up to this summer. I'll also update my travel blog with some residual posts that I didn't get around to.

:)