Tufts Blogs

During Civic Semester, part of your experiential learning is interning at a local organization. For my cohort there were four options for organizations: Maetha, a farm focused on supporting the community around it and prioritizing sustainable practices, Leaf in the Garden, focused on finding ways to create products out of the fallen dried leaves to help prevent forest fires, Thai Tribal Crafts which aimed to empower women in Indigenous villages and help them sell their handmade goods, and Inter Mountain Peoples Education and Culture in Thailand (IMPECT) that prioritized Indigenous Peoples rights in Thailand and also focused on advocacy work. Our first month in the country we got to visit each organization so we could get a sense of what each prioritized. Then our instructors sent us a form and had us explain our interests and what organization we liked the most. I fell in love with IMPECT because I was really interested in Indigenous Peoples in Thailand and the advocacy side of things. 

While we were staying in Chiang Mai city, Yeili (my peer who interned with me at IMPECT) and I would take a Grab (which is the equivalent of an Uber) to IMPECT. During our second week at IMPECT we were invited to go to a village about three hours away. During that trip we were able to meet some of the people in the village, see their sustainable practices, and of course enjoy traditional food. When we moved into the village to live with our host families, our transit to the internship looked a little different. Everyone but my peers who interned at Maetha would hop in our van and get dropped off at our organizations. IMPECT was always the first stop and was about forty five minutes away from our home-stay village. When we got to IMPECT our day really depended on where our supervisor needed us. The first couple weeks at the internship we were able to sit in on meetings about new technology used in the village to track biodiversity. A lot of the time we helped translate documents from Thai to English so they could be presented when visitors or donors came to visit, We also worked on presentations and a leadership handbook which was both in English and Thai. On our last village trip I had the opportunity to go and (attempt) to teach kindergartners some English which ended up being much much harder than I thought. 

My internship experience was really special and gave me amazing hands-on experience and I was able to learn so much about Indigenous People in Thailand. Each internship experience is different but I can say all of my peers in my cohort really enjoyed their experiences. Being able to intern outside of the U.S. was such an incredible opportunity and has helped me prepare for future opportunities.