- Hi everyone, my name is Chloe Rose,
I'ma senior at Smith College.
I'm a Middle East Studies major,
with a concentration in Refugee
and Forced Migration Studies, and I've been studying
Arabic for four years now, both at Smith
and also at Amherst College,
where I took fourth-year Arabic.
Professor George just asked me to make a quick video
to talk to you guys about some of the stuff
that you can do outside of your classes at Smith
with either a Middle East Studies major
or an Arabic Language minor.
So what I'm going to do is just walk you through
some of the stuff that I've done
throughout my four years at Smith.
Because my concentration is Refugee
and Forced Migration Studies, most of the work
that I've done has been with displaced people
from the Middle East.
Of course, there's so much going on in Middle East studies
beyond that, but my work has been focused on that,
so that's kind of what I know about,
and opportunities I know about.
If you want to learn more about any of these opportunities
or are interested in volunteering or working
in this space, please do email me.
Professor George can give you my email.
I'm happy to talk about any of this stuff
and kind of guide you further if you want.
So I'm just gonna share my screen
and give you some, make you aware
of some different opportunities that are available to you.
So for one, I want to talk about volunteering
and working with refugees.
Using your Arabic language skills,
like this is something, this is a very vital skill
that you're gaining in your classes
as you study Arabic, that can open up a lot of doors
for doing really cool work with displaced people.
So, one of the things that I did was,
I think for a total of about eight months,
I interned with the International Rescue Committee.
So the International Rescue Committee
is a huge humanitarian organization,
they work all over the world,
but in the U.S., their primary focus
is on refugee resettlement and integration.
So they work with refugees from the minute they find out
they get to move to the U.S. up until five years
after they arrive, and they do everything
from buying their first set of groceries
when they first get here to enrolling their kids
in school, to making sure that they have
the necessary health paperwork,
to finding jobs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So super important work, super cool,
and they hire a lot of interns,
every semester and every summer.
If you're interested in doing something like this,
you can go to rescue.org and I would look
at their state websites.
So right now I'm in their NYC office.
The internships that I did, I did two,
so one I was an economic empowerment intern,
so I was working in the department
that works with refugees from six weeks after arrival
up to five years and I was doing career development,
so I was doing job placement, CV writings,
and helping people get placed in jobs in the United States.
The second internship I did was youth education intern,
so I was working with families pretty much
the second or third day after they arrived
in the United States, mostly from Syria,
and getting their kids enrolled in school
for the first time.
In addition to that, I taught two English language classes
with the International Rescue Committee
and I also worked as a classroom assistant
in a different ESL class, so if you're interested
in English teaching, the IRC has a lot of opportunities
to do that as well.
So that's the IRC.
The second organization I want to talk to you about
that's really cool and has a lot of opportunities here,
is an NGO called Paper Airplanes.
So I work for Paper Airplanes now
but I started as an intern like two years ago
at this point, I think.
Paper Airplanes is an NGO that works entirely remote.
It has staff and volunteers from every continent
in the world, it's so cool, unique,
so many interesting people, and what they do
is they do education and career development
for conflict-affected people in the Middle East.
So we have one, two, three, four, five departments.
They all require volunteers, we do coding,
English language, Turkish language,
'cause for Syrians living in Turkey
this is really critical, and the department I work in
is career advising and academic advising.
So we particularly work with refugees
that are not necessarily refugees,
conflict-affected people that want
to get their degree abroad.
They're looking for those scholarships
to be able to come and study in Europe, Canada,
the United States, Japan, et cetera.
And we run on volunteers, so we match
people one-on-one, right?
So if you're interested in tutoring English, for example,
you can apply to this organization
and what we'll do is we'll match you with someone
that's conflict-affected and you can teach them English.
If you have Turkish language skills,
you can do that as well.
Sometimes we take undergraduate people
in student advising, most of our student body
are looking to get their master's degrees,
they already have undergrad degrees,
so our volunteers are for people a little bit older.
Nevertheless, do keep an eye on this organization
if this is something you're interested in.
In addition to volunteer roles,
we hire four or five interns, if not more, every summer,
and these internships are usually
about 10 hours per week, so it's not that big
of a time commitment and it's something
that can be done in addition to working, for example.
That's Paper Airplanes.
Next thing I want to talk about, I'm sorry,
I'm trying to fly through this
and be conscientious of y'all's time,
I also had the opportunity before COVID
to volunteer abroad in refugee settlements in Europe.
I don't know how much you all know
about this situation, but in places
like the Greek islands, asylum seekers and refugees
are in really difficult situations,
and as a result, a whole bunch
of humanitarian organizations have kind of responded.
That being said, international volunteering
can get really dicey for a lot of reasons.
A lot of organizations promote what we call volu-tourism.
I can talk about that with people who are interested,
I have a lot of thoughts on that.
White saviorism, things, they just don't work very well,
right, and if you want to do this,
I really recommend that you proceed with caution,
and I really like this website, Indigo Volunteers.
Indigo Volunteers is a grassroots organization
that basically sorts through and, what's the word
I'm looking for, curates, I suppose,
a list of NGOs that are super tiny
and doing really important work
in the refugee situation in Greece,
France, different countries in Europe,
and also in Lebanon as well.
So if you're interested in doing international volunteering
over J term or over the summer,
this is a great place to look.
So you can go here to volunteer roles,
and they basically list, these are from organizations
that need volunteers.
And you can apply this way.
A lot of these volunteer opportunities
provide free housing,
sometimes even free food for volunteers,
which is great, and let me just see.
Let's see, our partners, so this is just
for your reference.
See, these are all the different tiny NGOs
working with refugees that they recruit volunteers for.
I got this, my volunteer trip completely funded by Smith.
I couldn't have done it without Smith's funding.
If you want to learn more about that,
please do email me, I'm happy to talk about it,
but I spent a month, a little more than a month in Greece
and didn't spend a penny, thank you Smith College.
So please do contact me about that
if you're interested.
So that's kind of a summary of my humanitarian work
that I've done and I hope that that's helpful for you.
Really quickly, being mindful of your time,
I want to talk about an internship
that I did with the State Department.
So in addition to full-time summer internships
offered by the State Department
that are over-competitive,
a lot of people don't know about this opportunity.
So the State Department, every single year,
posts hundreds of 10-hour-per-week, unpaid internships
and this is a really great way to get
your foot in the door in the State Department, I think.
And obviously like, they do work all over the world
and all different departments,
but you know, for example, El Salvador,
China, but you can filter this list
to work in the Middle East region
if that's what you're interested in.
So you apply in July for this,
they select interns in August,
and then you usually start in September
and they're usually one semester or a year long,
and they're 10 hours per week.
So I just wanted to make you all aware of this,
as an additional opportunity
in addition to like the uber-competitive internships
full time offered over the summer
in the State Department.
Let's see.
Yeah, I think that's it for me,
there's not enough time in this video for this,
but also I've done some summer language study.
I was a Flash Scholarship recipient,
so if you're interested in that,
please do email me, I'm happy to speak
with you about it.
That's it for me, thank you guys so much,
and like I said, please do be in touch
if you have any questions
and best of luck with your studies.