Now partnering with Harris' Career Development Office, WRI is a truly global organization committed to protecting the environment for future generations.
June 04, 2018

 

Young leaders at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy have a broad array of internship opportunities open to them, but a new partnership with The World Resources Institute (WRI) – which began this year – will provide aspiring practitioners with hands-on international experience working on environmental policy, as well as issues of economic opportunity, and inequality.

Last year, Alejandra López Rodríguez MPP’18 (expected) was placed as an intern with the Human Rights and Governance program of the Open Society Foundations. The Open Society Foundations place interns with other organizations, and so Alejandra came to intern at WRI with the Environmental Democracy Practice, that works to empower people to have more access to information and justice relating to their environmental rights. 

“I was impressed with the WRI summer program from my first day as an Environmental Democracy Intern,” says López Rodríguez. “WRI provides plenty of opportunities to engage with teams and managers from across the organization. Every Program and Center gave a presentation on their objectives and exciting projects that they are working on.”

Harris and the Open Society Foundations began a comprehensive partnership in 2016.

The experience was invaluable, López Rodríguez says. “I was given the opportunity to organize a period of field work that my mentor and I conducted in Colombia, co-authoring a report on violence against environmental and land defenders in Colombia.”

At that time, Harris Public Policy did not have a direct relationship with WRI, but the Harris Career Development Office (CDO) saw the value in the experiences that López Rodríguez gained, and immediately got to work to create a formal partnership. 

“WRI is a natural partner for Harris for so many reasons,” says Paige Azuma, associate director of employer partnerships at Harris. “The organization aligns with our commitment to inquiry and the use of data to inform better policy decisions. Even more, WRI’s focus on energy and environmental work continues to align with our student’s interest, according to our most recent Career Outcomes Report.”

Paige Azuma, associate director of the Career Development Office at Harris

The 2018 Career Outcomes Report was released by CDO on April 25, and showed that environmental policy is one of the top three policy areas that graduating Harris students go into, the other two being energy policy and social policy and inequality.  

The new partnership between Harris and WRI will offer young professionals public policy internship experiences spanning energy, climate, governance, urban development, economics, and finance. 

Each year, five aspiring policy leaders will work with the WRI on various intern programs and projects. At the end of the program, more than 60 individuals from universities across the country will come together to present final projects in front of WRI leadership. 

With more than 700 experts, staff and researchers, WRI is a truly global organization with offices in Brazil, China, Europe, India, Indonesia, Mexico and the United States. Its board of directors includes a former president of Mexico and leaders in government and business from around the world.

Jeremy Edwards, senior associate dean of academic and student affairs at Harris

“The Harris toolkit prepares our graduates to create a positive social impact in whatever career they choose to pursue,” says Jeremy Edwards, senior associate dean for academic and student affairs at Harris. “Because of WRI’s depth and breadth of programming, we’re able to provide Harris students with an opportunity to practically apply what they’re learning inside of the classroom to a vast array of real-world issues and challenges prior to graduation.”

The WRI partnership is one of many in a long list of formal partnerships CDO has facilitated to ensure that Harris provides the policymakers of the future with the skills and experience to be successful in the workforce. These opportunities can also have more direct impact: on average, one in three WRI interns transition into full-time roles at the organization. 

Azuma, the CDO associate director, continues, “The types of internships will change from year to year. In an organization that has the scale of WRI, the variety of internship programming can change just as our students’ interests do. Long-term, we’re most excited to have unique and varied internship opportunities to offer.”