Finding a Job in the Field: Don't, Don't Be Vague

by Transitionland

category: Humanitarian Relief

Published February 20, 2009 @ 03:01PM PT

This is the second part of a series looking at how to find a job in the field.  The posts were written by Transitionland, a woman with a human rights and development background trying to break into international aid work.

As for background - Transitionland has spent the last five years as a volunteer, intern, fellow, and junior employee in various human rights and humanitarian organizations in the States and abroad.  She is currently continuing a decade-long obsession with Afghanistan and is passionate about refugee issues.  She also writes the phenomenal Transitionland blog.

Part one is here, and part three is here.

Step one in finding an internship is figuring out and articulating what you want to do, specifically. "I want to help people," is too broad, vague, and unhelpful, however honest the sentiment behind it may be. Anyone who is going into this line of work wants to help people, and potential supervisors will take that as a given. The real question is: whom do you want to help most, or first?

Do you care deeply about civilian war victims? Are you passionate about women's involvement in rural economic development? Are you a walking, talking encyclopedia on refugee issues? There are organizations that work specifically in each of these areas. Maybe you have multiple interests. Recently, I wrote in an informal job-related email, that areas I am interested in working in include; relief, media development, women's political and economic participation, human rights broadly, and public health. That's a lot of areas, but still specific enough to be serious. Still, the more specific, the better. I once had a classmate whose academic and professional obsession was grassroots organizing of gay and lesbian communities in the Philippines. I know he graduated last year, and I would bet a lot of money (that is, if I had any!) that he is working in grassroots organizing of gay and lesbian communities in the Philippines.

Ok, so you know what you want to do. Now, you need to find out who is doing that work. If you have an internet connection, this is pretty easy to do. Using internship specific and issue keyword searches on Idealist and ReliefWeb (under the advanced search option) are good places to start.

If you're American, or looking for an internship in the US, Idealist will give you a good idea of what's out there.

ReliefWeb will show you more opportunities abroad, especially in countries with major, ongoing relief efforts and development projects.

When searching ReliefWeb for internships, use the Advanced Search feature to search "Internship, [your area of interest]" and then "Intern, [your area of interest]".

Part three will be up tomorrow.

[Road in Afghanistan - Photo posted to Flickr by Carl Montgomery]