Internship Essay
Background
I am a Saudi Arabian citizen who is senior at Boise State University hoping to graduate in 2015. I have majored in Political Science and International relations. I enrolled for an internship as an employment specialist intern at International Rescue Committee in Boise Idaho. International Rescue Committee is an organization that helps people who have been displaced from their homes following conflicts or disaster related issues to gain control recover and survive. Its team play a great role in providing healthcare, learning, economic support and infrastructure. IRC rescues thousands of refugees more specifically in 22 cities of the United States. In the organization, I am greatly involved in the handling refugees originating from developing countries that include Burma Uganda, Somalia and other countries experiencing wars such as South Sudan, Somalia and Iraq.
In addition, the organization is very committed offering service to its clients. It responds to emergencies within 72 hours and provides urgently required services such as supplies and expertise who can handle various types of emergencies. The organization team stays within the area of emergency for as long as their services are required.
The organization also invites volunteers to collaborate with it with the aim of helping the refugees by creating plans geared towards ensuring self-sufficiency. In addition, the collaboration offers guidance and counselling through all the stages of clients resettlement. Such sufficient plans include setting goals, budgeting and other teaching and learning services.
My position as an Employment Specialist Intern is to report to the Employment Team Supervisor as well as working closely with other four employment specialists of the organization. In addition, we provide essential tasks whose aim is to help in serving IRC clients when need arises. These two roles are general to all the employment specialists’ interns. I had many roles as an intern in IRC. First, I provided logistics for transportation of clients to and from the IRC. This involves provision of data on the transportation of the organization’s clients. Under the same docket, I assisted clients who had transportation barriers together with helping bike and bus routes.
In addition, I was entitled to create resumes for clients during job readiness trainings. Furthermore, I played a great role in assisting in paper and online applications for refugees as well as accompanying the refugees to job interviews. Moreover, I also created and maintained client calendar of events and made the clients aware of the upcoming classes to help them avoid missing the classes. Besides, I also trained clients on how to fill out forms and practice how to write names and addresses. Finally, I was also entitled to providing career assessment screening on computer and help refugees improve their computer skills.
I made application to Global Talent Idaho looking for an intern related to my profession in their organization. I conducted an interview with Tara Wolfson from the organization and luckily enough I secured a position. However, my school schedule could not allow me to fix with the organizations schedule. As a result, the organization sent my resume to another organization that happened to be IRC. I attended their interview, they created interest in me and I was privileged to be part of them since I had a great passion of handling refugees or people from diverse cultures.
The provisions of the company fitted with my goals. My main goal for the internship was to practice my profession in an excellent organization. I found IRC to be very helpful in realizing my goal since it develops helped me develop international relations. I have a great passion in working with a non-profit organization. This intern gave me a good experience that will help me achieve my major goal of working with the United Nations in the future.
Internship Challenges
Although the internship was overwhelming, challenges remain part of life. Throughout my internship, the main challenge I faced was language barrier. Many of the refugees that I handled where unable to communicate in English thus creating a great challenge on my side. Most of the refugees that I served came from countries that English is not their first language. As a result, it was very hard for them to present any issue using the English language. Instead, they found it better to communicate using their language that may not be well known by people from the organization apart from those coming from their country of origin.
In addition, other refugees lacked the basic education thus making them not to understand anything when they were taught in class. As a result, they made the teaching and learning process difficult for the teachers to handle. In addition, it also led to wastage of more time during the teachings.
Plan for conquering the challenge
Following this issue, I came up with another goal of ensuring that I learn a few other languages beside my native Arabic and the English languages that I was conversant with. I found it important to learn these languages since they will one day become very important in future as I focus on achieving my goal of working with United Nations that deals with people from all walks of life. In addition, I decided to learn more and more about the immigration system in the U.S. and other countries of the world.
Lessons learnt from the internship
I learnt that in order to be an all-round professional in my field, there is a great need to have a diverse knowledge on various cultures and languages. Working with international organization requires one to have a profound knowledge about different cultures of the world since the work will involve close interactions with the clients of different cultures. In addition, diverse language knowledge is very important in enhancing information sharing with clients.
In addition, I learnt the best ways of planning a calendar of events within an organization. The format I was using during the internship to plan for the calendar of events seemed to be more appealing and time conscious. As a result, it helped me learn a lot on how to prepare a calendar of events for the organization as well as my own calendar of events using computer-generated technologies. This computer technologies play a very great role in calendar events planning since I has a reminder alarm that reminds one of each day’s events and the way they follow each other in a logical manner.
Furthermore, thought the internship I have known ways of handling people with resettlement issues. The internship gave me good understanding of the issues faced by people experiencing wars and disasters. I acquired experience on how to relate with refugees through interactions. Besides, I gained knowledge on how leave with people of diverse cultures. As a result, I am able to listen, understand other people feelings, and act accordingly without infringing their happiness.
Moreover, I learnt about the politics of various countries among which many refugees come from. Many refugees come from countries with a politically unstable due to high levels of insecurity arising from terrorism and civil wars within the countries. In addition, I was able to understand the reasons as to why these refugees ran away from their countries. The main reason applying to many of these refugees is fear of wars in the regions they stay. Nevertheless, I was able to learn news from different countries thus enabling me to know much about the politics, cultures and economies of different countries of the world. Finally, I learned much about immigration in the United States. This includes the reasons as to why many people are immigrants in the United States of America. In addition, this has also helped me to learn more about the U.S. immigrations levels not to mention the U.S. immigration laws.
Future career plans following the internship
Throughout the internship, I enjoyed working with refugees. As a result, I developed a passion in working with people of diverse cultures. Nevertheless, it made me to like jobs that have relation with solving problems arising due to disaster, conflicts and wars a given country. Following all this, I have decided after my graduation from Boise State University I will wish to work with the United Nations.
Final Report
Work Accomplished during the internship
Throughout the internship, there are many activities that I was able to accomplish successfully. First, I was able to assisting the refuges in creating their own resumes during job readiness training. I played a great role in helping the refugees on ways to develop good resumes in order to increase their chances of getting good jobs with organizations from different regions of the world. In so doing, i endorsed proper resume writing skills to the refugees. In so doing, so many refugees were able to secure jobs due to their proper resume planning and writing.
In addition, I was able to develop skills of being a self-starter. By helping refugees to solve their problems right from scratch, I was able to develop a big sense of being a self-starter when issues cross my way. As a result, I am able to overcome a problem and develop a strategy of continuing with my own life without the need of depending on other people for guidance and direction.
Furthermore, I was able to enhance my critical thinking skills during the internship period. The problems that faced the refugees I handled became a starting point of improving my thinking capacity thus enhancing creativity. With developed sense of creativity, I am able to develop various solutions of underlying problems in my life. The internship thus helped me to gain more knowledge and skills vital for problem solving.
Besides, I was able to help the organization in developing and maintaining clients’ calendar of events as well as notifying clients of their classes. This implies that I was able to deliver with high levels of efficiency in developing and maintaining calendar of events for the organization. I developed proper calendar of events that did not clash at any given time thus helping the class activities of the clients to run smoothly as planned. In addition, this helped the organization in saving time and enhancing client satisfaction.
Nevertheless, I was able to help many refugees in developing computer related knowledge and skills. Many refugees who I handled had little or no computer basics. As part my roles and responsibilities, I was able to teach and guide them in different areas of computer literacy. I found it interesting to teach the refugees since they were able to acquire the basics very fast although language barrier was a great challenge. At the end of it all, many refugees were able to develop better computer knowledge and skills.
Moreover, I was able to teach the refugees how to fill out forms that are very important especially when applying for jobs and when working in any organization. Most of the clients were not able to fill out forms on their own but at the end of it all this clients were able to fill any type of form. Under the same training, i was able to train the clients on how to write their names and addresses of organizations. Many of the refugees did not have any basics in writing their name as well as addresses. I took this initiative to develop such skills to such clients since this applied in all areas of their stay.
Finally, I was able to relate whatever I learned in the college with real life situation. Much of what I was doing throughout my internship was a practical application of what i was taught in the college. The most interesting thing is that I was able to connect my professors taught me and what was happening in the field. This knowledge played a great role in giving me a plus in the internship as it was viewed by the human resource department of the IRC.
Relationship of what I learned in the internship with what I learned in the college
There is a very close relationship between whatever I was taught in the college with what I learnt from the practical experience in IRC. College courses on international relations clearly identified cultural diversity as a very important issue to take into consider as a professional in this field. Practically, this came out to be very important and of great concern. Since I was working with people of varied cultures and languages, it was a challenge to me in handling clients who did not understand the English language.
In addition, the problem solving and conflict resolution techniques I learned in the college were also applicable in the field. Just as the college education had taught me about identification of a problem then going a mile further to look for the main causes and effects of the problem before going to the field to look for the solutions, is the same way we applied the problem solving method during the internship period. Ideally, this implies that there is a close relationship between what is learnt in the college and practise of that knowledge.
Talking experience to future employers
I feel honoured to have developed such imminent level of experience from IRC. To talk about my experience with future potential employers, I would first include all the roles and responsibilities that I played in IRC in my resume. In so doing, I will be able to provide the employers with the job experience details they may require. However, to enhance the applicability of the job experience to the future employers, I would first consider the job I am applying for, then include the job experience from the viewpoint of the job requirements.
I would also talk my experience by sharing what I have gained so far with the employers in their premises during the interviews. During the interviews, I would provide the employers with precise knowledge I possess and the experience I earned during the internship. This includes giving them all the details one by one in order to help them ask any question they feel is necessary as it pertains to my experience. Nevertheless, this would play a great role in increasing my chances of securing a job with such employers.
Things I would change in IRC during my internship
During the internship, there are various areas that I found I would develop in order to uplift IRC to greater heights. First, is the way they organization plans for clients transportation logistics. I found it would be better to make use of a special computer software through which data about the clients’ transport would be easily prepared than the use of local Microsoft program that may take one a lot of time to gather and enter the information.
In addition, i would assist the organization in developing a strategy for the organization in order to help in improving the levels of language understanding. Many of the refugees rescued by IRC lack the language to communicate their issues. As I result, I would introduce learning and teaching program that will focus on training the refugees’ English language immediately as join the organization. This would help them to learn the language very fast hence able to present their problems without any problem.
In conclusion, political science and international relations is a course that exposes students to understand people interactions among various countries. It plays a great role in helping understand people cultures and how to respond to their feelings. As a result, this internship was very much helpful in my profession and largely helped me to choose areas that i will be comfortable to work on once I complete my degree in future. Indeed it helped me create passion in handling people from diverse cultures and thus my focus is to work with United Nations in the future.
