Spring 2008
Molly LOHMAN
SAPU Miraflores
SAPU Miraflores is a public emergency room in a cerro of Viña del Mar where I got to see all types of smaller scale emergencies, everything from headaches and stomachaches to large cuts, burns, and seizures. There was never a dull moment in SAPU, getting to know the amazing group of paramedics and doctors was only the beginning of a great experience. How I spent my days in SAPU changed drastically from the beginning to the end of my experience. I was always presented with the flexibility to decide how I would spend my time everyday in SAPU, but by the end of fifteen weeks I spent much more time participating and actively assisting patients. Aside from preparing the patients to see the doctor, I also had the opportunity to give injections and learned other procedures such as taking electrocardiograms. Everyone, including the doctors, paramedics, and nurses were always willing to stop and talk with me about any questions, specific or general, about what I was seeing, and in this way, I not only learned about the Chilean public healthcare system, but also about a part of Chilean society I would have never seen without an internship.
Hilary MISLAN
Consultorio Placilla
My internship at Consultorio Placilla, a public medical center, has been an intense and educational experience. I work with the social worker there, observing her with her patients each day and learning about the various problems that affect the quality of life for this demographic. The staff of the Consultorio is wonderful--after a few weeks I feel like I fit in there, and everyone is friendly and welcoming. The Consultorio serves patients from a variety of social and economic backgrounds, but most of the patients I see with the social worker come from very low resource families. My special project with the social worker involves working with pregnant women who have high social risks. We will be evaluating the situations of about 10 to 15 women and planning “interventions”-- workshops to be run in their homes that will hopefully educate them about ways to improve their quality of life and their health. I think the most important thing that the internship has done for me so far is that I’ve been able to see a side of life in Chile that most exchange students and tourists are oblivious too. It’s another reality that is tough to take in, but it has been an eye-opening experience.
Rachel BARBER
Centro de Educación Continua (CEC)
My internship is at el Centro de Educación Continua (CEC) in Valdivia and though I am the first foreign-exchange student to intern at CEC I’ve had no trouble adjusting and fitting in. Everyone at the office is incredibly friendly and the people I help out have definitely made great efforts to involve me in what they’re working on. At CEC I have two main jobs. The first is helping the head of project development with the current projects that are being undertaken. Since I have gotten here, I have been helping with the proposal for la escuela de talentos that CEC hopes to launch in a few months. I have written the anticipated results section of the proposal, which while being an intimidating task, proved to be very rewarding (thankfully my coworkers are understanding with my grammatical errors). I now am researching existing IT programs for a new program that’s being developed to evaluate computer literacy of students in the area.
The second job I have as CEC is that of starting a weekly film series at the office. This job has been fantastic. The director of CEC originally proposed it when I first met with him and told him that I was interested in film. Sebastián, a teacher at the university in Valdivia who also works at CEC, and I have picked 11 films relating to the theme of “imperfect love” which will be shown every Wednesday night at the office.
At CEC I have experienced an independence that I had not at all anticipated. I have been given the freedom and responsibility to start a film series, contribute ideas in meetings, and add my own take on the anticipated results of programs. All of this has made my internship a very exciting and gratifying experience.
Cassidy D'ALOIA
Centro de Estudios Agrarios y Ambientales
My internship is with CEA (Centro de Estudios Agrarios y Ambientales), a small office of biologists in Valdivia. CEA has had several Middlebury interns in the past, so everyone there is extremely friendly, supportive and understanding of any language barriers. As a biology major going into my final year of college and trying to figure out what direction I want to go in afterwards, it’s an incredible opportunity to be able to try out this work in the “real world.” The type of research CEA does is exactly what I’m interested in—natural history, ecology, conservation, etc. so it’s interesting to how it all plays out in actual research as opposed to what I’ve done in the classroom. Thus far, I’ve gone on a week-long field project measuring trees in a restoration forest, completed a lot of biodiversity analyses of Chilean animal species and am now beginning a more independent, academic project of a literature review on river restoration.
For me, the experience has been full of all the ups and downs of any internship: the excitement of becoming comfortable in a new work environment, getting to know supportive co-workers, feeling competent in my Spanish and useful in the office, but also the struggles of being the newest, youngest and most inexperienced person in an office that requires a lot of expertise and coming to terms with the type of assignments that allows for! Overall, the internship is an incredible learning experience for me and certainly useful in terms of figuring out my future career. It’s also just great to have a fun and comfortable environment to both meet new people who are interested in the same things I am, and at the same time to be able to do more professional or academic work.
Maggie MAYER
Municipalidad Temuco
Working in a public sector of the government indeed has a lot to teach, just by observing the construction of various projects the bureaucracy is prominent and the complications plentiful. The department of rural development consists of employees with training in all different backgrounds, engineers of various sorts, social workers, and historians. Thus far I have been working on two rather distinct projects.
The goal of the first project is to bring drinking water to a 15 km stretch from the edge of the city, through various communities, ending in Chol Chol. Since the water in Chile is privatized the municipality is forced to work within the system of private companies to buy water for the rural communities. The water is meant to aid the indigenous communities however there are strict laws that limit the sale and purchase of indigenous land to other indigenous people. As a result, the municipality is forced to acquire the land by offering other public services in exchange.
The second project is of a completely different nature and is still in the stage of drafting a proposal rather than instating the idea. My task was to draft a document arguing why they should build a volcanic observatory on top of Cerro Ñielol—a historic monument and tourist attraction here in Temuco—to be used for educational, scientific, and tourism purposes.
In addition to these projects I will be working in the school of Boyeco exchanging English for Mapudungun. The municipality is indeed the perfect place to learn about my new surroundings; the one difficulty is the feeling that I am learning more than I am able to contribute.
Fall 2007
Alethea Gross, Valparaíso
I interned at Liceo Pedro Montt, a public school in one of the cerros of Valparaíso, as the assistant to the third-grade teacher, Lina Cortés. The school has roughly 700 students from PreK to 12th grade. My internship was probably been one of the best experiences of my time abroad. I spent every afternoon helping “Tía Lina” with the class. Although I started the first few weeks of the semester by mostly observing and checking math homework, I ended up doing everything - reviewing tests, explaining math concepts, checking homework, teaching a half hour of English, but most of all, simply being another person in the room to give attention to the kids. Our third grade class had 29 kids and most came from very difficult family situations. While it might be as simple as coming from a lower income background, for others, their dad is in jail and their mom left the family, so they live with their grandmother. Because the students come from this type of background, they find most of their support and attention from adults in school. The Chilean education system is very much based in ideas of repetition and memorization, so the lack of active teaching and learning within the classroom can be frustrating at times, but on the whole, this experience was incredibly rewarding. In addition to helping during normal class time, I also helped tutor the kids who were behind in subjects like math or reading and it was been amazing to see the progress that some of them made just from being given individual attention. Tía Lina and all of the staff at the school were incredibly welcoming to me and made me feel completely included in the incredible community of the school. My internship in the liceo was amazing and has really made me seriously consider education as a career.
Garrett Kevin REYNOLDS, La Serena
The organization Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory
(CTIO) is a mostly American-funded observatory that takes advantage of Chile’s enviable atmospheric conditions. Not surprisingly, CTIO’s telescopes are located on Cerro Tololo, a mountain an hour’s drive from La Serena. Because of the telescopes’ remote location, most of the astronomy is done from the office in La Serena.
My internship consisted of learning Interactive Data Language (IDL), a programming language commonly used in astronomy, and later using it to help with a program being developed by a physicist. The program used data collected from the telescopes, processed it and gave instructions to the telescope’s Adaptive Optics System. This system (AOS) was responsible for deforming the primary mirror (4.2m diameter), and in our case corrected for any aberrations (imperfections) in the different mirrors of the telescope.
The internship was a great experience. Although at times, it was difficult and demanded more than the 20 hours per week requirement, it was very rewarding. It always helped to ask questions when I was having problems, and my jefe was extremely patient in explaining everything to me.
Spring, 2007
Dylan GRAETZ, Valdivia
My Internship has been amazing and one of the best parts of my time here in Valdivia. It is where I have spent most of my time, but the hours remain fairly flexible, and it has not inhibited me in any way. I have spent most of my time working in an external consultorio of the hospital, which is affiliated with the University. It is called “Consultorio Externo de Valdivia” and my director is Dra. Loreto Podestá. I have not worked so closely with Dra. Podestá, but she is around every morning and she has taken particular care of me, making sure I am happy and learning and busy. I work with the “internos” students in their final year of med school, who are basically doctors working under a real MD. The consultorio is in a poor neighborhood and the patients I have helped attend are all kids (I have been working in pediatrics). Every afternoon I watch and help take patient histories and examen the patients. Every week I learn more, and depending on the patient and the intern my role has ranged from just listening to actively participating. In the mornings I also have attended seminars with the interns about a variety of subjects and spent time visiting a couple other areas of the consultorio. I have never been bored and I could have continued working there forever, but I wanted to get to know the hospital and am particularly interested in pediatric oncology so I made some efforts in that direction. It was a little more complicated to gain authorization to work in the hospital, but I ended up spending my last three weeks there. I mostly just observed in the hospital, but the doctors are wonderful once again and they kept me very involved in every case, discussion, and procedure. I have also done lots of medical reading to keep up with it all. It´s been a priceless experience and I´ve learned lots about medicine, Spanish and the health care system in Chile.
Jill MORRISON, Valdivia
I worked in CEA (el Centro de Estudios Agrarios y Ambientales) and it was possibly the best decision I made. In my first few weeks with CEA, I took trips to Panguipulli (a rural town) where we visited some of the local mapuche people and talked with them about a project on conservation of the barn owl. I also took several trips to the field, including collecting trapped rats and various excursions to collect seeds of the native trees (for a project I spent many weeks working on). I also took several trips to the Isla del Rey, an island in the river near Valdivia where CEA has a workstation and is engaging in numerous projects (my project involved creating a system of nets to collect falling hazelnuts in order to later weigh them and discover how much fruit each tree produced). Going into the experience I was hoping to have an internship that involved trips into the field and would allow me to have daily interactions with an interesting group of people. This is exactly what I got. The people in the office were all incredibly friendly, to the point where they invited me to their houses for dinner and on weekend excursions. They were also extremely patient with my comprehension and speaking difficulties and repeated things ad nauseum to help me understand. Another aspect of my internship that I really enjoyed was the time I spent making a series of dioramas with various educational themes (such as dispersion mechanisms of seeds). This was a really simple and relaxing opportunity in which I was able to engage in art projects and had room to shape the projects as I saw fit.
Matt PLITCH, Valparaíso
The opportunity to work inside the house that Pinochet built! While living and studying in the city of Valparaíso, Chile, I worked as an aide to a Senator of the Chilean National Congress. The Senator and his staff were very welcoming and kind and immediately made me feel like I was part of the team. Although I think there may be ways that that the internship could be better tailored to a North American student, I learned a ton and am extremely grateful for the opportunity to work inside the walls of Congress. Through my individual projects and through working within the Chilean political environment, many of my internship hopes were fulfilled. The major project of my internship afforded me the opportunity to work as a political consultant and campaign strategist, for me a tremendously exciting professional path that I now know I want to pursue later in life. Overall, it has been a unique and wonderful opportunity that I am so glad to have experienced.
Ana SISSON, Valparaíso
I interned at the SAPU Miraflores under the supervision of the Corporación de Salud de Viña del Mar. I worked at a primary care emergency clinic in Cerro Miraflores of Viña del Mar. I learned so much in four months. I began by shadowing the doctor yet from the first day they had me giving injections and by the end of stay I was putting in stitches from start to finish alone. The staff was amazing and they became my second family in Chile. They were friendly and bright, but they also enjoyed teaching me anything and everything. Near the end I also wrote and administered a survey to the patient population about their quality of treatment and their understanding of the services they were receiving. This experience was very very very rewarding and I will never forget neither what I learned, nor the people I had the privilege of working with for over four months. I am truly thankful for having been given this opportunity.
Fall, 2006
Sarah WILSON, Valparaíso
I had an internship at a colegio, helping out in English classes, music classes, and with a few sports teams, and observing history and philosophy classes, as well as spending time with students and teachers at various functions.