Internship Blog Series: International Rescue Committee

by Jillian Mcallister | Apr 17, 2013 | Graduate Students, Internship Experiences

Jillian Mcallister is a graduate student interning at the International Rescue Committee (IRC) as a Continuing Education Intern. The IRC responds to humanitarian crises globally and assists refugees who have fled from war-torn countries. Read about her experiences with this organization, and the work that she does.

The major project I have been working on since January, and which gets a little tedious at times, is streamlining searching the City University of New York (CUNY) system to see if they have program that a client is interested in.  The CUNY system is comprised of 24 colleges, throughout the 5 boroughs, varying from associate degree community colleges to 4 year colleges.  However, some colleges are subject-specific such as the College of Journalism, and many others are Liberal Arts schools.  As someone unfamiliar with the system, I discovered there is no easy way to search across all campuses for a program.  Thus, I am developing a Master List of colleges by borough and what undergraduate, graduate, and certificate programs they offer.  Now that it is just about finished at nearly 40 pages, it is still quite cumbersome once you identify a program in a college with a wide variety of majors, to find the name of the school and subsequently which borough.  Thus, I am now trying to streamline this process further.

I have also worked on comparatively smaller projects such as translating important terms for IRC for newly arrived clients, from English to Spanish.  I adopted one intake sheet used for tracking college application processes to be used for all clients when we initially meet with them and map out a plan to help them pursue their educational goals.  As we often discuss quite a few options in our meetings. I give them a copy of this sheet after each meeting if notes were added in subsequent meetings, to help slow the potential head spinning a day or 2 later.  We also plan to use the data on these intake sheets to supplement the monitoring and tracking for our monthly reports on demographics and services provided.

Some of our clients had prior education in their home country that they may not have been able to pursue further or it may have gotten interrupted due to conflict.  In such cases, I need to determine if the client has documentation of previous education such as transcripts and/or diploma, and what they equate to here in the US.  Some are in the native language and need to be translated and evaluated, some are in English and need to be evaluated as to equivalency in the US.  I also advise students on agencies that provide these services.  This is quite a new experience for me.  I have spent over an hour with a client and on the phone with a variety of agencies because what the client had—a single, original, opened version of her transcript in English—did not meet what they wanted—an official, original, sealed version—and thus would not evaluate it.  After an hour I located an agency in Miami who stated the same requirements as the other agencies, but understood what the situation was in the client’s home country, Iraq, and would accept the original as she had it.  It took me that long to locate an agency who would work with her, considering I have a list of agencies who provided these services, could explain exactly what the situation was, and am a native speaker of English.  I could not imagine having to do it from her position and thus why I was glad to spend that much time on it.  At one point I had considered sending her home, telling her I would work on it, and contact her when I had an answer.  But at that point we were no further than when her case worker brought her to me, so I felt I couldn’t send her away.  She was so thankful for me just calling around to different agencies, and it encouraged me to continue what I was doing.