PROOF POSITIVE that things here have a certain fluidity to them was established today, when I walked into the Washington Center today for the second day of orientation (more on the first later) at 1pm, and left at 3pm with a completely different internship.
How did I become such a renegade, you ask? Well, in order to come to DC, I had to get a J-1 visa (which is a new visa specifically designed for internship and training program participants coming into the US from Canada). In order to get a J-1 visa (in addition to filling out a pile of last-minute paperwork that kept me up most of Monday night, and spending an extra twenty-ish minutes biting my nails at customs) I had to have an official internship placement (and my supervisor had to sign my forms). So, I accepted the offer of the only organization that had gotten back to me by last Friday, International Action. And I was pretty happy about it, although I had applied and/or interviewed for a couple of other internships that were more substantial, more immediately related to my field of interest (international human rights law and policy) and with larger organizations that offered opportunities for more inter-organizational collaboration.
One of these was a placement with Women Thrive Worldwide (formerly the Women's Edge Coalition), which is a nonprofit representing a coalition of more than 50 different organizations that focus on the (mostly economic) rights of women internationally. In the words of their website (found at http://www.womensedge.org/), Women Thrive "develops, shapes, and advocates for policies that foster economic opportunity for women living in poverty. [They] focus on making U.S. international assistance and trade programs prioritize women," with the belief that the economic empowerment of women is the most direct route to combating world poverty.
The internship position that Women Thrive was offering sounded valuable, substantive, and exciting (more details when I actually begin work!), but I didn't get a callback before I had to respond to TWC with my confirmed placement, so I accepted another (one that was not as ideal, but still great) and figured that was that.
That was, that is, until things calmed down on Wednesday, and I finally got a chance to check my email inbox. Sometime while I was on the plane that morning, my interviewer at Women Thrive had emailed me: they wanted to offer me the internship! The problem was, I already had one. Very slight madness ensued.
I spent most of Thursday (and Friday) intermittently consulting with my advisor and calling my contact at Women Thrive. The upshot: by the end of today, it was established that my visa could be transferred, TWC would send other people over to International Action to interview for internship positions, and that, for all intensive purposes, I could officially accept Women Thrive's offer (which I did).
So, all's well that ends well. :) I think this new internship will be an amazing experience, and I'm very happy about seizing the opportunity to take it. It's been pretty slow going getting the information coordination going between TWC and Women Thrive (which will henceforth be known as WTW), but for all intensive purposes, I know where I'm working for the next two months, and I'm pumped!
Obviously, I've moved in to a new apartment, explored a new city (so cool-like NYC only scaled down both in terms of size, and dirtiness), and met new roommates. All of this equals many, many more paragraphs. But I think this entry's long enough - so I'll keep y'all* in suspense about everything else until later this weekend.
* See? I'm picking up the local dialect already! And yes, I'm in DC-but that particular expression seems to creep in to the language of a surprisingly large number of people here.
;-)
Friday, May 30, 2008
Friday, May 23, 2008
An Abruptly-Ended Waiting Game
I'M VERY FAMILIAR with the admissions process. You send your favoured places piles of paper carrying your somehow-transcriped awesomeness. They review said piles of paper. You avoid looking at the phone/into the mailbox, bite your fingernails down to stubs, and then, roughly in proportion to how many piles of paper there are, how grumpy the admissions committee is, how the stars align, the degree of padding your resume boasts, and how much Murphy likes (or really doesn't like) you, the phone rings and/or the mailbox is filled.
What I didn't know is that some maverick activities and organizations refuse to conform to this universally accepted process. Yes, pursuits do exist whereby there are actually no freaking rules that govern the admissions process at all. Trying to get a summer internship in Washington, DC (which is the international capital of internships, leading to competition so intense that the city is also regarded, by a disgruntled minority, as the world capital of free, university-educated labour) falls into this category.
If you choose to do your internship through an organization like the Washington Center (http://www.twc.edu/), you don't just get an internship specifically tailored to your career goals. You also get to attend a bunch of private speaking engagements, and other activities, with TWC participants in your field. You get to take a related academic seminar taught by a naionally-recognized expert-often someone outside the academic community. And you make tons of amazing contacts.
But applying for an internship through an organization like TWC essentially means that there are TWO separate admissions processes that you, as an applicant, must contend with. I discovered that firsthand. Admission to TWC's International Affair's Program? Done a mere two weeks after I sent my application package to the University of Alberta's study abroad centre (I also got amazing financial assistance through scholarships this way, which is another reason why it gets my recommendation). I got an official acceptance letter, access to an online placement tracking system, the contact info of my advisor. Then, a whole lot of nothing.
What makes things so complicated is that TWC is standardized, while the internship placement process is not. At all. Period. Some internships start at the beginning of May, some at the beginning or even middle of June. Some of your most coveted institutions may only have internship programs for Masters or doctoral students, and you'll never even know this. As I discovered, some institutions contact you right away; others wait months. Some want an hour-long phone interview; others want a totally separate application package tailored to their needs; and still others (like my placement) just give your application and resume a close read, then call you up and offer you a job. It's a confusing process, to be sure. That means two things: that placing your affiliation in the hands of people who are paid to find you a job will give you peace of mind, and that it will likely make things a bit frusterating at the same time.
There are no regrets on this end, though. After a month of nail-biting, multiple interviews, cover letter rewrites, and more email correspondance than I'd care to admit, I'm on my way on Wednesay to an internship with International Action, an organization that's developing and implementing a chlorination system to provide clean drinking water in Haiti. I'll also be taking a course on civil and ethnic conflict while I'm in the capital, which is right up my alley, and definitely not offered at the U of A.
It's going to be a great summer. The hard part, though-getting my suitcase(s) packed in time to catch my 6am Wednesday flight-is yet to come.
;-)
What I didn't know is that some maverick activities and organizations refuse to conform to this universally accepted process. Yes, pursuits do exist whereby there are actually no freaking rules that govern the admissions process at all. Trying to get a summer internship in Washington, DC (which is the international capital of internships, leading to competition so intense that the city is also regarded, by a disgruntled minority, as the world capital of free, university-educated labour) falls into this category.
If you choose to do your internship through an organization like the Washington Center (http://www.twc.edu/), you don't just get an internship specifically tailored to your career goals. You also get to attend a bunch of private speaking engagements, and other activities, with TWC participants in your field. You get to take a related academic seminar taught by a naionally-recognized expert-often someone outside the academic community. And you make tons of amazing contacts.
But applying for an internship through an organization like TWC essentially means that there are TWO separate admissions processes that you, as an applicant, must contend with. I discovered that firsthand. Admission to TWC's International Affair's Program? Done a mere two weeks after I sent my application package to the University of Alberta's study abroad centre (I also got amazing financial assistance through scholarships this way, which is another reason why it gets my recommendation). I got an official acceptance letter, access to an online placement tracking system, the contact info of my advisor. Then, a whole lot of nothing.
What makes things so complicated is that TWC is standardized, while the internship placement process is not. At all. Period. Some internships start at the beginning of May, some at the beginning or even middle of June. Some of your most coveted institutions may only have internship programs for Masters or doctoral students, and you'll never even know this. As I discovered, some institutions contact you right away; others wait months. Some want an hour-long phone interview; others want a totally separate application package tailored to their needs; and still others (like my placement) just give your application and resume a close read, then call you up and offer you a job. It's a confusing process, to be sure. That means two things: that placing your affiliation in the hands of people who are paid to find you a job will give you peace of mind, and that it will likely make things a bit frusterating at the same time.
There are no regrets on this end, though. After a month of nail-biting, multiple interviews, cover letter rewrites, and more email correspondance than I'd care to admit, I'm on my way on Wednesay to an internship with International Action, an organization that's developing and implementing a chlorination system to provide clean drinking water in Haiti. I'll also be taking a course on civil and ethnic conflict while I'm in the capital, which is right up my alley, and definitely not offered at the U of A.
It's going to be a great summer. The hard part, though-getting my suitcase(s) packed in time to catch my 6am Wednesday flight-is yet to come.
;-)
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