Cameroon, Denmark, Fiji, Hawaii: MIIS Students’ Summer Adventures

Monterey might be the center of a Middlebury Institute student’s universe for nine months out of the year, but when the summer arrives, many students scatter to the farthest reaches of the globe to take part in internships, fellowships, and other professional opportunities. Fortunately for those readers who enjoy living vicariously, a number of these explorers also share tales from their adventures via blogs hosted on the Institute’s blogging community.

If summer weather makes you dream of the ocean, the Center for the Blue Economy (CBE) can help; as part of the program, the CBE’s Summer Fellows are required to blog about their fellowship experience. In recent weeks, student bloggers have checked in from locations including Denmark (Lance Park), Fiji (Shaun Richards and Joshua Morris) and Hawaii (Matthew Coomer and Sorina Seeley), with future updates expected from Indonesia (Alexander Kalish). Other CBE Summer Fellows didn’t travel as far—Melinda Domurat and Megan Godfrey are in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Galen Wangberg is right here in Monterey—but are continuing to share observations and insights gained from their summer experiences. All are expected to graduate next year with a Master of Arts in International Environmental Policy.

Other student blogs chronicle adventures that extend beyond a single summer. Laura Preston MPA ’17, a Peace Corps Masters International Student in the Master of Public Administration program, is currently serving her Peace Corps assignment in Cameroon, in West Africa. Preston hopes to continue her career in international education development and project management, and has worked in the past with students and children in Italy, Russia, Reunion Island, Switzerland, and Tanzania. Her blog offers eloquent reflections on subjects including the need for more native African perspectives to be represented in online writings about the continent, and the opportunity she had recently to apply her MPA skills to help design a new school in a remote village.

Preston’s fellow Peace Corps Volunteer and International Environmental Policy student Lindsay Cope MAIEP ’17 also continues to blog from her service assignment in the Philippines. Lindsay departed in July 2014 and expects to return to Monterey this fall to complete her degree. Recent blog entries by Cope share tales of coral gardening, giant clam restocking and a night scuba dive.

The wide range of other opportunities for Institute students to live and work abroad, which includes the International Professional Service Semester, the DPMI Plus program, and the Frontier Market Scouts, is summarized on our Immersive Learning and Study Abroad page. While results vary from year to year and program to program, in a typical year, nine out of ten Institute students seeking a relevant summer internship or fellowship are able to secure one.