Weissmans World

In early October, the University announced the end of its six-year, $2.1 billion capital campaign. These monies have funded buildings, professorships and academic centers--valuable to Harvard in the long-term, but remote from today's undergraduates.

One line item, though, was funded soon after the campaign's inception and has given opportunities to undergraduates every year since.

For the past six years, students have received funding from the Weissman International Internship Program to pursue internships abroad. Their workplaces ranged from a community development program in Yoff, Senegal, to the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, France.

"When [Dean of the Faculty] Jeremy R. Knowles proposed the campaign, he had a line item in it about the international internship program," says Paul M. Weissman '52. "My wife and I saw this and said, this is what we want to fund, and we jumped on it."

The program now provides funding for more than 20 participants every year and serves as the University's model for programs to help students go abroad.

A Success Story

The Weissmans initially gave $5 million for the internship program. Paul Weissman served on the International Issues Planning Committee at that time, and says the group saw a need to provide non-academic international exposure to Harvard undergraduates.

"Every member of the committee felt this was a void in terms of what was available to undergraduates and that Harvard had to do something about it," Weissman says.

He acknowledges that Harvard is not generally known for encouraging students to go abroad.

"Even when I was at Harvard back in the late '40s and early '50s, Harvard felt that the best education you can receive is in Cambridge," he says.

The International Issues Committee found that most students on financial aid were not able to go abroad during the summers, because Harvard asked them to use part of their summer earnings for tuition and expenses.

Since Harvard revamped its financial aid program in 1998, giving students larger grants, it gotten easier for students to spend time abroad, according to Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons '67.

"In the old days, you could work with the student employment office and OCS [Office of Career Services] and you could usually find some way to get paid for working abroad, but it was hard," Fitzsimmons says. "We want this playing field to be level, and this is a major commitment on the part of the college."

When the Weissman program started in 1994 only "a handful of students" participated, says Associate Director of OCS Jane Pavese, who is in charge of program administration. In recent years it has been heavily publicized and has gained a wider reputation on campus.

And Fitzsimmons says the program's appeal reaches beyond Harvard. He often uses it to entice potential students.

"We get lots of questions about whether or not we have a junior year abroad," Fitzsimmons says. "One of the things that happens with people here is that many people get here and they intend to study abroad, but things just get in the way."

Fitzsimmons says he presents summer internship programs like the Weissman program as a solution.

And the Weissman program now appears to be bursting at the seams.

A recent program information session that was designed to accommodate fewer than 100 students actually attracted well over 150, Pavese says. And a full-time OCS staffer was hired to replace a departing part-time employee to coordinate the Weissman program, among other duties in the international opportunities office.

"In almost every talk [Knowles] gives or has given on the campaign, he mentions the Weissman program," Paul Weissman says. "It's being talked about from the top all the way down. I'm convinced that this is a commitment on their part."

But if work-abroad opportunities expand at Harvard, they seem unlikely to come from within the Weissman program. Paul Weissman says he will soon have completely endowed the program according to its original specifications. After that, he says it is up to the Harvard endowment to increase the fund.

"How much more it will grow I'm not sure, but we would all like to have as many students as possible," Weissman says.

According to Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68, the carefully chosen interns have helped make the Weissman program successful. The program's selectivity should be preserved, he says.

"I don't know what the growth might be in the future, or how many students there are right now who are otherwise eligible and have good projects lined up but unable to take advantage of it," Lewis writes in an e-mail message.

Weissman says he hopes the program can serve as a model for other University centers that might wish to establish internship programs abroad.

International Long-Distance

The Weissman program requires that students already have confirmation of their internship offer before they apply in the late winter.

While the Weissmans and OCS staff are closely involved in making sure participants' internships are a success, they are on their own before being accepted. Interns say they were on their own for the most challenging part of the process--finding and applying for internships.

"Jane Pavese and her assistants were receptive to questions, but it was made clear that it was our duty to find the internship," says Katheryn M. Hayes '00. "Since it is a competition, and one of the requirements is that this internship be specific to you and special for you, you really need to go out and find something unique that's going to make a difference in your life."

In the case of Hayes, who spent the summer before last working for a documentary film company in Buenos Aires, the experience was a crash course in adapting--both for her and her employer.

"The film company was having funding issues, so I ended up doing a lot of atypical things," Hayes says. "I helped with casting, and I sat in on meetings with producers and music technicians and other writers. I even learned how to tango in the director's garage."

Despite the emphasis on individuals' initiative in finding internships, Pavese insists that OCS does provide significant resources to students interested in the program, which has awarded funding to some 20 to 25 students annually in recent years.

"There's a lot of opportunity for students to come here for the strategy and research needed to pursue internships," Pavese says. "We don't have lists of internships, because part of what the program values is finding internships that fit students well."

Many Weissman interns spoke highly of the self-selective nature of the application process, noting that those students who ultimately receive awards tend to find internships they are deeply committed to pursuing. The challenges of finding an internship abroad also narrow the pool of applicants.

"It is kind of scary," says Siripanth Nippita '00, who worked to promote women's health last summer for a Brazilian non-governmental organization. "A lot of times it's frustrating to sit in front of your computer and not know who to call. Ultimately, that's the biggest obstacle."

Several students said the encouragement they gained from OCS-sponsored meetings about the Weissman program gave them an impetus for the internship search.

"I went to a meeting about it last fall," says Anne C. Durston '01, who worked for a family planning organization in Mexico City last summer. "The people who spoke there inspired me to look into finding an internship."

Professional Immersion

According to Paul Weissman, the chance to work in a foreign country is the quickest route to cultural immersion.

"[My wife and I] feel that the best way to get to know a culture is to work there and rub elbows with the people that really know it," Weissman says.

Ashley F. Waters '00, who used a Weissman grant to work on development issues in Udaipur, India last summer, says Harvard does not have many resources available to help students work abroad.

"The program is special because [the Weissmans] encourage you to do things outside of your academic field in a new context," Waters says. "There's an enormous difference between what you learn from [Stone Professor of International Trade] Jeffrey D. Sachs ['76] and what you learn that these organizations are actually doing on the ground."

Anjali Chelliah '00, who worked to increase AIDS awareness in India last summer, points to the value of applying what she learned in Harvard classrooms.

"The concept of international public health was very nebulous for me before I went to India and got to really experience the issues involved," she says.

The Weissmans take a personal interest in each intern's experience and the overall success of the program, even though they do not participate in day to day administration. Among the improvements Paul Weissman said he would like to see in the program are providing language training and allowing students to travel in the country of their internship.

Past interns say that once they were awarded the grant, they felt like part of a larger family of interns. The Weissmans help create this atmosphere by meeting with the group in the spring and fall, and corresponding with individual students over the summer. Paul Weissman says they were excited every morning to see if new e-mail messages had arrived from other parts of the world.

"They're kind of like two quasi-parental figures. They wanted us to write them a couple of letters while we were abroad. It helped us analyze what we were getting out of the experience," Hayes says.

From London to India, and from Senegal to Israel, last year's Weissman interns went all over the globe. But certain characteristics of the program seem to be consistent.

Oddly, only one quarter of the 44 interns selected in the last two years have been male, although Pavese says this is based on a completely random selection process.

Chelliah, however, speculated that the same type of community service organizations at Harvard that overwhelmingly attract women, also tend to host interns abroad.

Additionally, at least one student organization, Bhumi, has come to serve as an unofficial conduit for finding internships in Asia. The group works with non-governmental organizations to match Harvard students with internships abroad. According to Waters, no fewer than six of last year's Weissman interns, herself included, found their internships through Bhumi.

Yet even if certain patterns have emerged in the Weissman program, the sheer diversity of individual experiences appears in the stories brought back from abroad by the interns who participated in the program.

Nippita, who worked in the fairly remote city of Goiania in central Brazil, remembers particularly one day-trip to a lake six hours north of the city.

"We went to a lake which is kind of an oasis in the middle of nowhere," Nippita recalls. "We went swimming in piranha-infested waters and then roasted piranhas for dinner. People do different things for fun, and it really makes you rethink what you do here."