The IEM Master’s Program at MIIS involves a semester of “practicum,” or professional experience along with coursework and long-distance sessions. I am currently completing this phase of my degree program.

Since January 2015, I have been working as an on-site intern for the Umbra Institute in Perugia, Italy, a school that specializes in community engagement for American study abroad students.

As a student services and community engagement intern, I work with students, faculty, and staff on a daily basis. My responsibilities begin with the coordination of workshops, excursions, volunteer and service-learning activities to expand students’ limits and improve their engagement with the local Italian community. However, I am also currently working on some marketing and recruiting and linguistic immersion initiatives that I proposed myself.

Work Samples at Umbra:

Check out a blog about one of the projects that I designed and implemented: SoloItaliano Challenge at Umbra. This is a new immersive learning initiative using gamification to inspire students to take a two-day Italian-language pledge.

Feel free to browse Umbra’s new Umbra International Experience Career Workbook . I designed this to help students reflect upon and articulate their new intercultural competence and linguistic skills. We conducted an interactive workshop to provoke the students into thinking about integrating their study abroad experience into their professional and personal futures.