Paid Internships that Keep on Paying

When Hannah Van Demark ’15 accepted an internship in rural Bolivia last summer, she wondered how her assigned task—offering $100 loans to farmers in the region of Cochabamba—could help them in a meaningful way.

She soon learned that a few motorcycle tires and a little ingenuity can make a big difference.

“One of the reasons the farmers were struggling was because their irrigation system was always breaking down,” says Van Demark, who interned in Bolivia for the Foundation for Sustainable Development (under Vassar’s Cornelisen fellowship). “We discovered that if you cut up some motorcycle tires, you could use the rubber strips to decrease the friction on the pumps and make them more reliable and efficient. The farmers were able to buy enough tires for $100 to improve the system.”

Van Demark, a history major with a concentration in international relations, says her experience in Bolivia helped her begin to envision her post-Vassar career, and her internship this summer—supported by the Tananbaum Family Leadership Program for Work and Development—will help her to solidify her plans even more.

Van Demark’s fellowship is one of 21 Tananbaum fellowships awarded for the 2013–14 academic year from a pool of 71 juniors. Established in 2011 by Steven (’87) and Lisa Tananbaum, and administered through their family foundation, the fellowships provide Vassar students with stipends between $5,000 and $6,000 for summer internships. Tananbaum fellows also receive guidance on applying to graduate school and on creating links with Vassar alums and others in their chosen fields from counselors in Vassar’s Career Development Office. Fellows participate in workshops on internship search skills, interview preparation, professional conduct, and networking—and the counseling continues through their senior year.

Since its inception, the Tananbaum program has awarded a total of 53 fellowships from a pool of 164 applicants.

Van Demark is using her $5,000 fellowship for an internship with the Senate Banking Committee. She’s particularly interested in examining how federal legislation such as the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act is affecting the domestic economy and “how current events such as the Iran- and Ukraine-related sanctions affect U.S. financial stability.”

Students considering the possibility of interning over the summer often must choose between a career-boosting internship that pays little or nothing or a better-paying job that will put money in their pockets. But Van Demark echoes the sentiments of many Tananbaum fellows: “The stipend has meant I could ignore the amount of funding the internships have and concentrate on which ones were best for me.”

This summer, Benedict Nguyen ’15 is interning at the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, where he is concentrating on the plight of immigrants to the U.S.—analyzing how laws and government policies affect various immigrant populations throughout the country.

Having a mother who was born in Vietnam, Nguyen can relate to the challenges of growing up in an immigrant family. The French and Francophile studies major spent last summer in Strasbourg, working as an intern with human rights organization Espace 16, which provides assistance to the city’s Roma population. The ethnic group has faced persistent discrimination relating to food subsidies, housing, and transportation.

Nguyen sees graduate school in his future but first wants to spend time in the field of social work. Those experiences, he believes, will help him to make more informed choices about the kinds of issues he’ll want to study.

Tananbaum fellow Tamsin Chen ’15 is spending the summer working for the iF Foundation, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that provides aid to farmers in rural Haiti. It won’t be her first experience in the country. Her interest began her first year at Vassar when she joined the Vassar Haiti Project (VHP), which supports Haitian artists as well as education, medical access, reforestation, and water purification projects in the beleaguered country.

Chen has twice visited the Haitian clinic and school supported by VHP, and she helps organize fundraisers for VHP back in the States. So, when she learned she had been awarded a stipend for an internship of her choice through the Tananbaum program, Chen naturally decided to return.

At the iF Foundation, Chen is designing and distributing a survey seeking information from about 4,000 Haitian farm families on topics such as income, health care, and education. The data will determine the best programs and protocols to support the farm families and expand their economic opportunities.

“The World Bank and other organizations conduct these surveys from time to time, but mine will include more open-ended questions,” says the international studies and economics major. “Often, it’s the personal narratives that provide the most vital information.”

Chen says her hands-on work in Haiti has stoked her desire to work for a government agency or an NGO before enrolling in graduate school. “The things I learned in Haiti have really enriched my international studies classes, and more experience in the field will help me when I get to grad school,” Chen says.

The Tananbaum fellowship has taken Colin Crilly ’15 to Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, where he is doing cardiology research and volunteering at a local children’s hospital. The biology and political science major is hoping these experiences will help pave his way to medical school.

Crilly has already been putting his interest in health care to work. Last summer he interned at the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine, studying the molecular structure of the throats of asthma patients. And this spring, he volunteered for Vassar ProHealth—a campus organization that raises awareness about health-related issues—providing HIV screenings on campus and raising money to fund secondary education programs for children with HIV in a village in Africa.

Once he graduates, Crilly plans to pursue an eight-year MD/PhD degree. His Tananbaum fellowship, he expects, will provide “a leg up toward
acceptance.”

—Larry Hertz