In the upcoming semester, I will be a U4 student going into my fourth year at McGill University. I am in the faculty of Arts and Science, majoring in Cognitive Science, with a minor in Economics. I am passionate about human development with particular reference to gender equality and universal access to health and education.
I was aware of the Arts Internship Program through older peers and when I checked the available internships for the Summer of 2021, the Institute of Human Development and Well-being stood out to me because of its emphasis on community-based projects that I felt had the potential to contribute meaningfully to people’s lives. I was eager to contribute to this work and to explore participatory research techniques and gender and agency research in the development context as a potential next step of my academic career. My learning objectives when I started the internship were to learn more about human development, agency and participatory research methods, as well as develop my skills as a researcher.
My host organization was the Institute of Human Development and Well-being (IHDW), a transdisciplinary unity led by McGill’s Faculty of Education. The IHDW addresses the role that leadership and policymaking can play in human development and well-being for at certain groups such as people with disabilities, people who have experienced emotional, physiological, or mental health issues, as well as traditionally at-risk populations.
My responsibilities during the internship were to provide support for the PREAM project, a 3-year international collaboration between McGill University and the Université des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Bamako (ULSHB) in collaboration with Plan International Canada and Plan International Mali that uses participatory visual methods to explore the perspectives of adolescent girls and boys on how they see agency. I helped with a survey of different applications that could be used for surveys that would be administered. I contributed to the translation of a literature review on this topic, documents that would be used for the website and the training workshop report. I also helped brainstorm ideas on how to get youth more engaged in the research process.
I am leaving this internship with a better understanding of how large-scale, international research projects work and knowledge about agency and participatory research methods. It helped me understand the role that language can play in research and in making research accessible to more people. I also had the opportunity to connect with people in the fields of work that I was considering post-graduation and this provided me with a lot of insight into what I would like to do next.
Given I was doing the internship remotely and was in a different time zone, it was sometimes hard to deal with meetings at odd times of the day. It was also hard to stay motivated given it can be hard to make connections in a remote context. However, the nature of the work and the wonderful people I was working with greatly offset these challenges. I dealt with the time difference by learning how to organize my day more effectively and stayed motivated by remembering what was at stake and the adolescents whose lives would be impacted by this research. Moreover, I learned to enjoy all the tasks I was doing even if they were outside of my comfort zone and appreciated the challenge. It also became easier to connect with people even over zoom.
While I am not receiving academic credit for the internship, the amount of knowledge shared with me by those I worked with is incomparable. I had the opportunity to work closely with Dr Kattie Lussier, professor in the International Studies department, and Dr Claudia Mitchell, Distinguished James McGill Professor in the Department of Integrated Studies with the Faculty of Education. I also learned a lot from Mr Ramy Gorgis, IHDW coordinator.
This internship helped me decide what to do in the next phase of my academic career and gave a new meaning to my studies. It also helped me make sense of how some skills could be applied to research in ways I had not realised, for example being able to translate technical documents.
