As the first semester of my junior year has begun and is in full swing, I have taken some time to reflect on my summer internship. This summer, I had the opportunity of spending 12 weeks at Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts as a program intern. While I knew that my internship would include setting up programs and tracking data from previous programs, I had not expected the length to which I would be working at.
I worked alongside 5 other program interns, and we were all worked on separate teams to conduct and create 3 programs throughout the summer. As I read through the descriptions of the programs that I would be helping out with, I initially thought that most of the participants coming to these programs would also be from the United States, however, to my surprise, the majority of them were international participants.
Some of the tasks that I was given were to build excel sheets with participant information, create small groups for participants to work in during the week (or weeks) that they were in Massachusetts, track feedback forms from past participants, and make surveys to send out.
The most rewarding part of my summer was being able to meet so many different people all coming from different places and with different backgrounds. As something I am very interested in is cultural interactions, it was interesting to be able to see how deans, provosts, high school principals, and teachers from around the world differed and related in their experiences in the secondary and higher education world.
My summer was filled with enriching and gratifying experiences and memories which I will take with me as I start to think about what I would like to do post-grad. While I know that the internship search can be very tedious, hard, and overwhelming, through my internship search, I found and learned that everything works out in the end!