Opportunities Abroad

The idea of an exciting internship in a foreign land sounds good, until you get to the details. Where will you live? What about support should something go wrong in the country? How do you navigate the legal and paperwork issues?

This is where IE3 comes in for many students at the University of Montana.

“When it came right down to it, it (was) an internship that had everything I wanted,” IE3 Internships past intern, Sarah Hawkaluk, said, “without leaving some of the more terrifying details up to me.”

Hawkaluk had done a previous internship in Missoula before interning in Bolivia through IE3. She remembers that was even “ hard enough to keep track of” by herself.

When she decided to go abroad for a second internship, she did some research and came across the Oregon State University-based IE3.

Hawkaluk is not alone in finding the services offered by IE3. The University of Montana has sent 53 students away on international internships with the help of IE3 Global Internships. IE3 operates in 17 universities in the Pacific Northwest and aims to help students find an internship and provide some structure and support along the way.

According to the IE3 website, the program has sent more than 2,000 interns to over 97 countries since the organization started in 1996.

Kevin Hood, the University of Montana’s IE3 Global Internships campus adviser, says the program came to Missoula in spring of 2009 after several years of discussion between UM and IE3. Hood encourages students to look into other programs as well, in order to ensure a good fit.

“In order to join, we had to waive tuition, which was a really big deal…so we did a lot of work on that,” Hood stated, adding instead of tuition, a fee is still paid to IE3.

The average cost varies depending on the location of the internship. Hawkaluk, estimated her internship costing around $8,000. This includes $3,450 paid to IE3 and a campus fee of around $300. Airfare and traveling costs are largely responsible for the remaining expenses. Though Hawkaluk says most of her costs were covered by scholarships. She advises other students interested in the program to get an early start on scholarships because deadlines are almost always in December the year before they travel.

In addition to finances, students are required to be in good standing academically and enrolled in a degree program at a participating college or university in order to be accepted. They also must also be in at least their academic junior year to be considered.

Students usually earn six credits and work a minimum of ten weeks full time in order to receive those credits. Students need to have a professor from their university that they communicate with throughout the experience. Each professor may require something different from each student, but past intern from Oregon, Khloe Frank, wrote a paper and prepared a presentation in order to receive her credit.

Both students and advisers say the internship is different than the more common study abroad programs offered at most schools.  A global internship through IE3 is a more independently run experience, connecting students to professional environments and are not as structured as a university. The University of Montana offers several other options as well for students interested in travel and internships.

“Study abroad would be a good first step and maybe then spring off that into a(n) internship, is a good, really good way to go often,” Hood said.

Frank said it was a “very individualized experience” during her ten weeks in Bolivia. Both Frank and Hawkaluk said there was very little they’d change about their experience, but recommended talking to the site supervisor as much as possible if an intern would want anything altered.

For both students the experience confirmed their choice in career path while allowing them hands-on experience. They each said they brought back a new perspective with them, as many other students who take advantage of opportunities like this do.

“It’s nearly 13,000 feet in elevation,” Hawkaluk said about Bolivia, “so it was an interesting balance between learning how to breathe and seeing people who were actually more starved for funds and resources than I was for oxygen.”