This piece is the first in a four-part series about Wellesley-funded summer internships offered through the College’s Lulu Chow Wang ’66 Center for Career Education. These eight- to 10-week placements are available across the United States and all over the world, and they count toward the experiential learning element Wellesley recently added to its degree requirements. In summer 2024, Wellesley provided internship funding for 285 students thanks to funds from alumnae and organizations that allow the College to distribute approximately $1.5 million annually through internship grants and program placements.
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Tenzin Karma ’26 logged onto Zoom to share highlights from her summer internship experience for this story after midnight: She was 7,616 miles and 9 1/2 hours from Wellesley, having just completed an internship at the Mumbai branch of the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), a think tank based in Delhi, India.
“I love Indian culture and have been to India before and really enjoyed my time there,” says Karma, whose parents grew up in the country, “and I also wanted to do an internship that would help improve my writing and research skills, so this seemed like an amazing way to combine both passions.”
Karma arrived at the ORF at the end of May and says she was intimidated at first: “I had to get used to the language of a think tank and learn a new writing style.” She researched the domestic economy of India and wrote short-form articles with policy recommendations. “It took some adjusting to figure everything out, but I received really great feedback on my writing from my supervisors,” she says.
There were a dozen interns in her cohort, and all except Karma were from India, though they studied at universities all over the world. Karma says the most rewarding part of her internship was “being surrounded by so many other interns and research assistants who were all around my age, and who were incredibly intelligent and very welcoming. I loved just talking to them.”
“I feel like I gained so much from them,” she says. “Getting feedback about my research ideas, but also just about life here in India in general … hearing their perspectives and seeing that we have a lot in common even though we’re from very different backgrounds.”
Karma’s position at ORF is just one of the hundreds of Wellesley-funded summer internships Wellesley’s Career Education department offers.
If you had asked me three years ago if I thought I’d be doing this in 2024, I never would have seen this coming. I know I wouldn’t be here in Oaxaca or have an internship like this if it weren’t for Wellesley.
“These placements represent Wellesley’s deep commitment to experiential learning across all campus departments and programs,” says Jen Pollard, Lulu Chow Wang ’66 Executive Director and Associate Provost of Career Education. “Career Education works with our faculty and staff to define opportunities all over the world that are aligned with our students’ career goals.”
“It’s a chance to explore and start understanding what opportunities are available for them beyond Wellesley,” says Lorraine Hanley ’98, director of internships in the Career Education department.
This summer, the College funded “Wellesley intern ambassadors” (as the Career Education department calls them) in 33 nations outside the U.S. For students who want to study abroad without missing a semester at Wellesley, internships are a great way to learn more about a particular field and explore a new place at the same time.
Karen Fukuda ’25 interned at the Climate Analytics headquarters in Berlin. A physics major and a music minor, Fukuda learned to write code in Python to help develop a climate model to predict the cost-optimal wind and solar technology installation for various countries, and she created briefing notes for the bilateral meetings at the Bonn Climate Change Conference.
Fukuda says she was pleasantly surprised by how much she enjoyed living on her own in Berlin and working in the office itself. “Climate Analytics was a really great place to work, because it was a very global office,” she says. “I was meeting people from many different countries, which was a new experience for me. That was the thing I enjoyed the most—getting to explore and meeting people from all different backgrounds.”
Across the Atlantic from Fukuda, in the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico, Gabriela Perez ’26 and Olivia Torres ’26 interned at the nonprofit Fundación En Vía’s “Growing Strong” program, developed during the COVID pandemic to help women in the region support themselves and their families and start their own businesses through zero-interest microloans. Perez and Torres were both drawn to the finance aspects of the organization. “Me, personally, I don’t want to work on Wall Street,” says Perez, an economics and Spanish double major. Torres, a political science-international relations major, is interested in “bottom-up development work.”
Torres and Perez both say that interacting with the women who benefit from Fundación En Vía was extremely rewarding. “Going into the communities and interviewing the women is really meaningful, because you get to have that one-on-one direct contact and really get to know someone else’s story,” says Torres. “And then you get to take that story and shape it into a report that will hopefully really help the organization in the long run.”
During her time at Fundación En Vía, Perez says she regularly found herself in awe that she had the opportunity to spend the summer in Mexico, doing this important work. When she applied to Wellesley, she had no idea the College offered so many funded internships. “Wellesley provides so many opportunities. The admission website is just scratching the surface,” she says. “If you had asked me three years ago if I thought I’d be doing this in 2024, I never would have seen this coming. I know I wouldn’t be here in Oaxaca or have an internship like this if it weren’t for Wellesley.”
Karma encourages Wellesley students to investigate all the College has to offer, really taking time to scroll through the lists of internships and seeking help from the staff in the Career Education office with preparing résumés, cover letters, and application essays.
Fukuda says attending the Tanner Conference is a great way to learn more about the internships, hearing presentations from fellow Wellesley siblings who did them in previous years. She also adds that students shouldn’t give up—she initially applied for the Climate Analytics internship as a sophomore and wasn’t accepted, so she applied again as a junior.
Perez agrees: “If you’re thinking of applying, just do it, even if you think you’re not going to get it.”
“Don’t sell yourself short!” adds Torres. “Even if you aren’t sure, don’t be afraid to take the risk.”
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The next application cycle for Wellesley-funded internships is from October 1 to November 1, 2024.