CCI to Continue Summer Internship Funding Initiative, Promoting New Student Ventures

By Renee Chang

As spring semester gets underway, the College is abuzz with activity. From classes to sporting events, there is hardly room to deny that life at the College is anything but uneventful. But besides classes and extracurricular activities, there is something else that lingers on students’ minds this season: the summer internship.

In addition to navigating the process of applying for suitable internships, students may face the challenging task of securing funding for opportunities that do not provide compensation. While the financial burden of an unpaid internship may deter students from taking on an otherwise exceptional opportunity, the Center for Careers and Internships (CCI) hopes to remedy this situation. Last year, the CCI rolled out a new funding program wherein rising juniors and seniors could apply for a fixed grant of $2,500 that would go towards funding an unpaid opportunity.

Cheryl Whitney Lower, Associate Director of Internships and Early Engagement at the CCI said, historically, students were provided with “significantly less” funding than the current $2,500 grant.

“The grants cover more expenses and allow students decision-making power over how they want to spend their summer and gain experience or explore an interest,” Lower said. “This amount will typically cover a significant portion of a more expensive experience in another country or in a city away from home, for example. Others may choose to do an internship with lower expenses and use some of the money to offset lost summer wages.”

And for Joel Wilner ’18 and Andrew Hollyday ’18.5, the grant did just that. Wilner and Hollyday both received funding to participate in the Juneau Icefield Research Program (JIRP), a program that recruits a select group of undergraduate and graduate students to participate in hands-on research in glaciology, or the study of glaciers.

Wilner, who hopes to pursue a PhD in glaciology, says that his time in Juneau, Alaska, was the perfect complement to his interest in glaciers.

“I have always been fascinated by the Earth’s cold regions, from both scientific and cultural standpoints,” Wilner said. “Even when I was very young, my favorite geographical areas to study were places like Greenland and Antarctica. I became interested in studying glaciology in an academic capacity after climbing the glaciers of Mount Rainier before coming to Middlebury. ”

In Alaska, Wilner’s scientific and cultural interest in glaciers naturally converged. On top of “traversing the entire width of the Alaskan panhandle” from Juneau to Atlin, British Columbia — all on a single pair of cross-country skis! — Wilner also got the opportunity to assist in first-hand scientific research.

“I worked with Dr. Seth Campbell, a research geophysicist from the University of Maine and the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory,” Wilner said. “We used ground-penetrating radar to investigate how surface meltwater percolates from the surface of glaciers to form layers, which has important implications for improving our models regarding how glaciers will respond to climate change.”

Nonetheless, the value of Wilner’s time in Alaska went beyond simply gaining work experience.

“The most memorable part of my experience at JIRP was staying at Camp 8, which is essentially a one-room metal shed near the summit of Mount Moore, a 7,000-ft-high jagged mountain near the US-Canada border,” Wilner said. “Two other students and I took a three-day shift at Camp 8 with the purpose of relaying radio messages between other camps on the Juneau Icefield that couldn’t communicate with each other directly by radio. Because this was our only real duty for those three days, we had a lot of free time. We spent this time looking out over a vast expanse of the Taku Glacier watching the sunset from our sleeping bags on the roof of the shed. The solitude was simply enchanting and life-changing, despite the abundant mold and mouse droppings in the shed where we lived!”

For Camille Kim ’16, the $2,500 grant went primarily towards paying for housing and provided a jumping off point for exploring her interest in software development. As a summer intern at the Wyss Institute for the Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, Kim was given the opportunity to develop her own software.

“The main project I was working on involved writing software to operate a device that researchers would use to automate the process of growing bacterial cultures, as well as a web application and user interface that would allow users to control and monitor their experiments remotely.”

Kim said the most satisfying moment of her internship was when the code she authored was allowed to run on its own.

“I still remember the first time we actually hooked up all the different hardware components and just let our code do its thing — it was a really satisfying moment to see what we’d been working on all summer start moving and coming to life,” she said. “It was a huge feeling of accomplishment to see that happen right in front of me.”

Similarly, Divesh Rizal ’17 says that teaching science and mathematics to eighth and tenth grades at the Udayapur Secondary English School in his native Nepal would not have been possible had it not been for the funding he received from the CCI.

Surrounded by “highly energetic, mischievous and curious” students, Rizal views teaching as an “art” that requires a heightened sense of awareness.

“Teaching is an art that requires an acute understanding of people around us,” he said. “It requires a state of being when you can truly speak to somebody, ensure your words are being heard. An important aspect of teaching is learning about the art of teaching itself, about your audience, about their opinions.”

Although he was only able to spend a month at Udayapur, Rizal found it difficult to distill his experience into a single memorable experience.

“Almost everything was memorable,” Rizal said. “But perhaps the most would be the impromptu singing competition we had in our class one day. It was the day when it rained heavy outside. Since the classrooms do not have glass windows, the water disrupted the class and the students on the opposite side made more room for the students by the window. Since we had a rather dense part in the room, we abandoned our books and took on a suggestion from one of the students. The ‘competition’ was between girls and boys in the class. The girls did a rather great job and they won the competition without a sweat.”

In addition to the $2,500 grants for rising juniors and seniors, the CCI also offers $1,000 “Explore Grants,” which are targeted towards first-year students and first-year Febs who have not yet committed to a particular career path and simply wish to “explore” different fields.

Students who posses a strong passion for dance can also take advantage of the CCI’s “Dance Festival Grant,” which Lower said were designed keeping in mind that “for many dance majors, participation in these festivals is important to their development as dancers and artists.”

To learn more about the different kinds of grants offered by the CCI and how to apply, visit go/funding.