Summer experience: my internship in Geneva!

Picking a course at university, as we all know, is meant to give us the skills and knowledge that are required to succeed in our professional life. However, as I have learnt in my two years at UEA, we all need as much help as we can get!

Internships, part time jobs, workshops and lectures are all necessary and welcomed parts of university life, as ultimately, it is not only the knowledge that you are getting in your lectures that will land you your dream job, but all those hours of practical jobs, reading emails, internships, learning from more experienced people, and career fairs that help you out with your aspirations.

Knowing that, I started to become interested in the internship programmes UEA, Career Central, and my own school of study could offer during my second year. After a few visits on the websites and meetings with CareerCentral, I learned about an opportunity to work with Graduate Women International (GWI). GWI is a non-profit organisation based in Geneva, Switzerland, that works to achieve secondary education amongst all women and girls. GWI has its headquarters in Geneva, but is present around the world in the form of national associations and federations (NFAS) as well as independent members. The organisation is currently run by Stacy Dry Lara, who was my supervisor during the month-long internship. This internship with GWI is run by the school of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies (PPL) of UEA. After a selection process composed of cover letters and Skype interviews, I was lucky enough to be selected for the internship, along with two other students.

My office space during the internship 

 As the partnership between the PPL School and GWI is new, we were the first students to go to Geneva and do our internships, which was a great opportunity and learning experience. My main focus throughout my time at GWI was the media list of the organisation. The media list is an essential document that all organisations and companies have, which is meant to include all relevant media contacts including journals, newspapers, relevant social media agencies and even official press contacts for countries’ governments; in GWI’s case, it needed a lot of reorganization, cleaning and research in order to make it relevant again. Additionally, I was given other responsibilities and shorter tasks, such as creating an Instagram account for GWI, finding ways to create exposure and interest in younger women, writing stories for the multiple publications GWI has, editing pictures and content for social media, working on templates for future communication with press related contacts, translating press releases into other languages, and occasionally answering phone calls at the office.

It was also an amazing learning experience as I was lucky enough to spend some time at the United Nations headquarters and around the beautiful city that Geneva is. 

The entrance of the UN headquarters with the flags

"Bains des Paquis" an open space on the lake in Geneva, the best place to be during summer! 

Overall, the internship at GWI was an amazing learning experience that I could not have gotten without UEA, as this is one of the many amazing opportunities our university gives to its students.