Yolanda Gutierrez

Student

“A lot of the kids I worked with had to teach me their games. I guess it’s been a while since I’ve been a kid myself.”

You see it over and over again with SMC Summer Interns: a passionate concern for the welfare of children. It’s something Yolanda Gutierrez has made a large part of her life and actually plans to make a career of. “I interned at the Santa Monica Boys and Girls Club, teaching kids games and supervising their play. During the year, I work at McKinley Elementary as a teacher’s assistant, helping kids to learn how to read and write. So being involved in play was a really nice change for me. And play is a very important thing for kids,” she continues, “ because it really builds self-esteem.”

Yolanda, who was born in a small town in Mexico, says that a career in caring for children is definitely in her game plan. “I want to be a school psychologist to be in a good place to help children become something,” she says. “I should be transferring to UCLA next year where I plan to go for ‘the works’ and get my Ph.D.” But an important part of Yolanda’s education took place this past summer during her SMC internship. “The Boys and Girls Club was a great place to work,” she reports. “The children all understood that the adults were in authority, but they still got along with us like buddies. And the staff people there never made you feel that it was a boss/employee situation. They really did make us feel like we were all equals and they accepted us.”

Yolanda says her internship “was like three benefits: it gave me some spending money, the scholarship paid for my books, and it let me do something to keep kids off the street.” And there was a fourth benefit for Yolanda. She got to work with her favorite people: children. How does she feel about that? Just look at the picture.

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