Amnesty International Internship

Hi all,

So my friend Winnie Hagemeyer from Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) is an exchange student at SUNNY New Paltz. This Summer Winnie had the opportunity to work at Amnesty International in NYC as an intern. I asked her to share a little bit about her experience and here is what she wrote:
"As summer approached, I decided to look for an internship, something related to human rights (my area of interest). After a month of checking my email compulsively, I was lucky enough to be offered an internship opportunity at Amnesty International’s office. I was thrilled to start working for such a big organization, and be able to get as much experience as possible. My bosses were great, and they encouraged me to get involved in the issues the office was dealing with. As an undergrad, I didn’t have enough experience to take on projects of my own, but I assisted them as much as I could, and eventually I was even able to lobby some countries for one of the issues we were working on. Big organizations, such as Amnesty, have the ability to influence policy making in different levels, and it was an amazing opportunity to be able to see it at the UN level.
I was assigned general administrative tasks, like filing reports and organizing the filing cabinet, but I also had the opportunity to go to meetings at the UN and with country missions, meet a number of interesting people who worked at different NGOs, and make important contacts. For someone with the little experience I had, I was willing to do any task, and it helped me better understand how the office worked.
Working at Amnesty allowed me to see how human rights NGOs work from within, and get an idea of how the UN functions on a daily basis. I have read several articles and books on how these organizations work, and the knowledge was helpful, but I learned more about how international relations work in real life during my summer than I had so far. The academic knowledge is an important tool in working with human rights, but you learn that a lot of it does not apply to reality."


Thanks a lot Winnie for telling us how it felt to work in such an overwhelming Human Rights Organization.