This piece is the last in a four-part series about Wellesley-funded summer internships offered through the College’s Lulu Chow Wang ’66 Center for Career Education. These eight- to 10-week placements are available across the United States and all over the world, and they count toward the experiential learning element Wellesley recently added to its degree requirements. In summer 2024, Wellesley provided internship funding for 285 students thanks to funds from alumnae and organizations that allow the College to distribute approximately $1.5 million annually through internship grants and program placements.
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Every morning for eight weeks this summer, Jade Doerksen ’26 would arrive at the Forbes House Museum and open the shutters, turn on the air conditioning, and empty the dehumidifier. While these are simple tasks, they are crucial to the operation of the small historical home in Milton, Mass., and doing them made Doerksen feel like a real member of the museum staff.
“The Forbes House Museum only has two salaried employees, plus a few interns, a good base of volunteers, and the board of trustees,” explains Doerksen, “so they were willing to let me lead on certain projects.” In addition to her morning chores, Doerksen, a history and Spanish double major, ran the museum’s social media, wrote an email newsletter, and researched items in the house that lack documentation as well as the religion of the Forbes family.
She also got to give museum tours. Toward the end of the school year, elementary school students in Milton study their town’s history and visit several historical sites, including the Forbes House Museum. “I gave the same floor tour to fifth graders a total of 32 times,” Doerksen says. “It was a lot of fun!”
Doerksen’s position at the museum is one of the dozens of Wellesley-funded summer internships offered through Wellesley’s Center for Career Education, which include individual placements in different countries or at organizations across the U.S. Doerksen was part of a cohort of rising juniors who worked for eight weeks at Boston-based nonprofits geared toward social change and community engagement through the College’s Lumpkin Non-Profit Internships Program. Like the internships offered with Wellesley in Washington and the Davis Museum, the program gives Wellesley students the chance to live together and learn from each other.
Doerksen shared a Northeastern University dorm room with Marcela Rosales-Harms ’26, who had a Lumpkin Service internship at the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program (BHCHP). As a case management and language access intern, she experienced many different facets of the organization.
“I want to go into medicine eventually,” says Rosales-Harms, a biology major and history minor. “Hands-on patient interaction is what draws me to the medical field, so I definitely wanted to be at an organization where I could see that, and [BHCHP] serves such a unique population.”
For the language access component of her internship, Rosales-Harms worked with the organization’s Spanish interpreter (she had previously provided a similar service at a free clinic attached to a homeless shelter in her hometown of Indianapolis, but on a much smaller scale), and for case management, she met with walk-in patients at BHCHP’s Oasis Clinic to help figure out their needs.
The Career Education and Civic Engagement departments are so, so helpful, and you can get a lot out of utilizing them.
“We had a super-supportive boss in case management who was just really great about pushing us to be independent, but also having trust in us to interact with patients,” says Rosales-Harms.
“These internships allow students to test their career interests and what they’ve learned in the classroom and see how that applies to the world beyond our campus,” says Jen Pollard, the Lulu Chow Wang ’66 Executive Director and Associate Provost of Career Education. “It gives them an opportunity to get out of Wellesley, Massachusetts, see what the world has to offer to them, and figure out where they can fit in and add value.”
Environmental studies major Sylva Das ’26 interned at the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF), a nonprofit that uses the law, science, and policy to make New England’s environment cleaner and better for residents. “I was focused on helping people understand how they can efficiently and cost-effectively maximize resources to switch to clean energy,” says Das. Through community outreach events, she assisted Boston residents in taking advantage of city- and statewide programs such as Mass Save to help them save money and energy, and in the office she learned how to write memos and briefs, and to decode the legal lingo and shorthand attorneys use to talk to each other.
Das biked daily from the Northeastern dorm to the CLF office on Summer Street near South Station. That experience, and the tragic deaths of two cyclists in Cambridge this summer, made her zealous about the city creating better bike lanes, which she wrote about for the CLF blog. “I realized that if you’re really passionate about something, even if it seems a little bit random, you can always find a way to connect the dots and make it applicable,” she says. “After talking to my supervisors, I realized how increasing biking infrastructure and safety is a really big part of reaching climate goals and reducing carbon pollution.”
Das, Rosales-Harms, and Doerksen all encourage members of the class of 2027 to look into the Lumpkin Non-Profit Internship Program for next summer.
“The Career Education and Civic Engagement departments are so, so helpful, and you can get a lot out of utilizing them. Wellesley has more sway in jobs than I thought it did,” says Doerksen. “I’m from Seattle, where not many people know of Wellesley, but in the Boston area especially there are so many connections.”
Doerksen says she is touched by how eager alums are to help current Wellesley students. For example, she had the chance to work and swap Wellesley stories with Susan Greendyke Lachevre ’81, a Forbes House Museum trustee and curator of the art and artifact collections of the Massachusetts State House, who told her to swing by the state house any time for a tour.
The Career Education internships team is even led by a Wellesley alum. “I love my job,” says Lorraine Hanley ’98, director of internships. “I feel so lucky that I get to bring these opportunities to students.”
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The next application cycle for Wellesley-funded internships is from October 1 to November 1, 2024.
To read the first piece in the Wellesley-funded summer internship series, click here, to read the second piece, click here, and to read the third piece, click here.