EGN NEWS DESK
Anoushka Bose ’20 spent the summer season of 2018 as an MIT Washington program intern, making use of her nuclear physics training to arms management analysis with a D.C. nuclear coverage assume tank.
“It’s loopy how a lot three months can remodel folks,” says Bose, now an legal professional on the Department of Justice.
“Suddenly, I used to be studying excess of I had anticipated about treaties, nuclear arms management, and international relations,” provides Bose. “But as soon as I used to be hooked, I couldn’t be stopped as that summer season sparked a much wider curiosity in diplomacy and set me on a unique path.”
Bose is one in every of a whole bunch of MIT undergraduates whose educational and profession trajectories had been influenced by their time within the nation’s capital as a part of the internship program.
Leah Nichols ’00 is a former D.C. intern, and now government director of George Mason University’s Institute for a Sustainable Earth. In 1998, Nichols labored within the workplace of U.S. Senator Max Baucus, D-Mont., creating choices for safeguarding open house on non-public land.
“I actually began to see how science and coverage wanted to work together so as to resolve environmental challenges,” she says. “I’ve truly been working at that interface between science and coverage ever since.”
Marking its thirtieth anniversary this yr, the MIT Washington Summer Internship Program has formed the lives of alumni, and expanded MIT’s capital within the capital metropolis.
Bose believes the MIT Washington summer season internship is extra important than ever.
“This program helps steer extra technical experience, analytical pondering, and basic MIT innovation into coverage areas to make them better-informed and higher geared up to resolve challenges,” she says. With a lot at stake, she suggests, it’s more and more vital “to spend money on bringing the MIT mindset of utmost competence in addition to resilience to D.C.”
MIT missionaries
Over the previous three many years, college students throughout MIT — whether or not learning aeronautics or nuclear engineering, administration or arithmetic, chemistry or laptop science — have competed for and received an MIT Washington summer season internship. Many describe it as a springboard into high-impact positions in politics, public coverage, and the non-public sector.
The program was launched in 1994 by Charles Stewart III, the Kenan Sahin (1963) Distinguished Professor of Political Science, who nonetheless serves because the director.
“The concept 30 years in the past was to make this a little bit of a missionary program, the place we show to Washington the utility of getting MIT college students round for issues they’re doing,” says Stewart. “MIT’s status advantages as a result of our college students are unpretentious, down-to-earth, involved in how the world truly works, and devoted to fixing issues which might be damaged.”
The outlines of this system have remained a lot the identical: A cohort of 15 to twenty college students is chosen from a pool of fall candidates. With the assistance of MIT’s Washington workplace, the scholars are matched with potential supervisors in the hunt for technical and scientific expertise. They journey within the spring to satisfy potential supervisors and obtain a stipend and housing for the summer season. In the autumn, college students take a course that Stewart describes as an “Oxbridge-type tutorial, the place they contextualize their experiences and replicate on the political context of the place the place they labored.”
Stewart stays as enthusiastic concerning the internship program as when he began and has notions for constructing on its foundations. His want checklist consists of operating this system at different instances of the yr, and for longer durations. “Six months would actually change and deepen the expertise,” he says. He envisions a real-time tutorial whereas the scholars are in Washington. And he want to draw extra college students from the info science world. “Part of the objective of this program is to hook non-obvious folks into data of the general public coverage realm,” he says.
Prized in Washington
MIT Vice Provost Philip Khoury, who helped get this system off the bottom, praised Stewart’s imaginative and prescient for creating the preliminary concept.
“Charles understood why science- and technology-oriented college students can be nice beneficiaries of an expertise in Washington and had one thing to contribute that different internship program college students wouldn’t be capable of do due to their prowess, their prodigious talents within the technology-engineering-science world,” says Khoury.
Khoury provides that this system has benefited each the host organizations and the scholars.
“Members of Congress and senior workers who had been creating insurance policies prized MIT college students, as a result of they had been highly effective thinkers and workaholics, and college students in this system discovered that they actually mattered to adults in Washington, wherever they went.”
David Goldston, director of the MIT Washington Office, says authorities is “sort of determined for individuals who perceive science and know-how.” One instance: The National Institute of Standards and Technology has launched a synthetic intelligence security division that’s “virtually begging for college kids to assist conduct analysis and perform the ever-expanding mission of worrying about AI points,” he says.
Holly Krambeck ’06 MST/MCP, program manager of the World Bank Data Lab, can attest to this affect. She employed her first MIT summer season intern, Chae Won Lee, in 2013, to research highway crash knowledge from the Philippines. “Her findings had been so putting, we invited her to affix the workforce on a mission to current her work to the federal government,” says Krambeck.
Subsequent interns have helped the World Bank show efficient, low-cost, transit-fare assortment methods; establish homes eligible for hurricane safety retrofits underneath World Bank loans; and analyze heatwave patterns within the Philippines to tell a lending program for mitigation measures.
“Every yr, I’ve been so impressed by the maturity, vitality, willingness to study new expertise, and curiosity of the MIT college students,” says Krambeck. “At the tip of every summer season, we ask college students to current their tasks to World Bank workers, who’re invariably amazed to study that these are undergraduates and never PhD candidates!”
Career springboard
“It completely modified my profession pathway,” says Samuel Rodarte Jr. ’13, a 2011 program alumnus who interned on the MIT Washington Office, the place he tracked congressional hearings associated to analysis on the Institute. Today, he serves as a legislative assistant to Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer. An aerospace engineering and Latin American research double main, Rodarte says the chance to expertise policymaking from the within got here “at simply the best time, after I was attempting to determine what I actually needed to do post-MIT.”
Miranda Priebe ’03 is director of the Center for Analysis of U.S. Grand Strategy for the Rand Corp. She briefs teams inside the Pentagon, the U.S. Department of State, and the National Security Council, amongst others. “My job is to ask the large query: Does the United States have the best strategy on this planet by way of advancing our pursuits with our capabilities and assets?”
Priebe was a physics main with an evolving curiosity in political science when she arrived in Washington in 2001 to work within the workplace of Senator Carl Levin, D-Mich., the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I used to be working actually exhausting at MIT, however simply hadn’t discovered my ardour till I did this internship,” she says. “Once I got here to D.C. I noticed all of the locations I might slot in utilizing my analytical expertise — there have been 1,000,000 issues I needed to do — and the internship satisfied me that this was the correct of labor for me.”
During her internship in 2022, Anushree Chaudhuri ’24, city research and planning and economics main, labored within the U.S. Department of Energy’s Building Technologies Office, the place she hoped to expertise day-to-day life in a federal company — with an eye fixed towards a profession in high-level policymaking. She developed an internet app to assist native governments decide which census tracts certified for environmental justice funds.
“I used to be pleasantly shocked to see that at the same time as a lower-level civil servant you may make change if you understand how to work inside the system.” Chaudhuri is now a Marshall Scholar, pursuing a PhD on the University of Oxford on the socioeconomic impacts of vitality infrastructure. “I’m fairly positive I need to work within the coverage house long run,” she says.
