Students and alumni had the opportunity to meet recruiters from more than 90 organizations at Career Fair 2014 on February 28. 

The opportunity to recruit Monterey Institute students and graduates drew 92 employers from all over the world to the Monterey Conference Center Friday for Career Fair 2014 on February 28. Organizations attending included global brands Apple, Driscoll’s, eBay and Honda, non-governmental organizations such as the Sierra Club and the United Nations Development Programme, language specialists like LanguageLine and Transperfect, and government agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of State.

The fair offered Monterey Institute students the opportunity to meet employers, learn about job opportunities, distribute resumés, and set up interviews. Some employers started the day before the fair, hosting information sessions and talking with students. MIIS alumna Sally Young (MATI ’99) flew in from Geneva to recruit candidates for the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). She appreciates the quality of MIIS candidates from the Graduate School of Translation, Interpretation and Language Education, in particular their “attention to detail, passion to keep learning, and desire to do in-depth research.” MIIS graduates make up half the full-time staff in her office and MIIS students also fill about half of the internships offered at any point in time.

“Every year, the Institute’s career fair attracts some of the top international employers in the U.S. and the world,” commented Institute President Sunder Ramaswamy. “It’s a direct reflection of how they view our graduates—as exceptionally capable international professionals who are equipped to hit the ground running and make a difference immediately.”

A complete list of participating employers can be found here.

Team El Salvador in transit between Monterey and Bajo Lempa.

Since its inception in 2006, Team El Salvador has provided 105 Monterey Institute students with the opportunity to hone their development and language skills while making a meaningful contribution to the lives of people in the Bajo Lempa region of El Salvador. This January, nine MIIS students were joined by two Middlebury students and, for the first time, a student from California State University, Monterey Bay.

Faculty director Adele Negro is the glue that keeps Team El Salvador together, but each year the leadership of projects is in the hands of students. The student-driven leadership model is, according to Negro, a key component of the program’s effectiveness. Another important factor is the consistency and longstanding partnership that has been developed and nurtured over the years with the two community partner organizations in El Salvador, la Coordinadora and the Mangrove Association.

This year, the students worked on four major projects:

• The “PLAS” Project, to help improve the functionality and implementation of the Local Sustainable Resource Utilization Plan.
• The Microcredit Project, to strengthen the administrative system of the NGO’s microcredit program under a new profit-based organization in order to improve its sustainability.
• The Public Spaces Project, to assess community perception and utilization of spaces and structures so as to answer the question: ”What makes for a strong, healthy, cohesive community?”
• A Photojournalism Project, to capture in visual and narrative forms the history, experiences and people characterizing the evolution of an eight-year relationship developed between Team El Salvador and its partners.

Many Monterey Institute alumni have spoken about the transformative effect their Team El Salvador participation has had on their studies and careers. Lauren Lambert (MAIEP ’15) appears to have a similarly meaningful experience: “While I have lived abroad on and off throughout my entire life, the three weeks I spent working in El Salvador contextualized what I am doing here at MIIS in a way that nothing else could have.” It “connected the dots,” and clarified how she can make the most of her time at MIIS, so that when she leaves she can have a more profound impact on what she sees as our shared “project human” – to leave this world a better place than when we arrived.

Xiao’ou Zhu (MAIPS ’14) in Sri Lanka on her Frontier Market Scouts field assignment.

Xiao’ou Zhu (MAIPS ’14) says she has always been interested in international development work, but that she had a very narrow view of what that meant until she came to the Monterey Institute. Her view before could best be described as a “brick and mortar” view of development involving official development assistance (ODA) and infrastructure support. That all changed when she took Professor Nukhet Kardam’s Development Theory and Practice class; “it opened a window into the possibilities of international development,” says Xiao’ou.

“For me the most interesting lessons were connected to sustainability and the importance of community involvement,” says Xiao’ou, who along with two other students from the Development Practice and Policy program, Sarah White (MAIPS ’13) and Abdul Khabir Mirzakhail (MPA ’14), worked on a proposal for a small-scale irrigation project in Ethiopia for a non-governmental organization. “It was a perfect team,” Xiao’ou says happily, explaining that they each brought different expertise and experience to a project they all believed to be applicable to their future careers.

More recently, when Xiao’ou applied for a very competitive internship at the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, she included their paper as a sample of her work. “I was thrilled when they contacted me and said they were very impressed with the paper!” She was offered a management role in a World Bank agriculture project in China but could not accept, as it would have meant a six-month commitment and she wanted to complete her studies at MIIS. Instead, she decided to join the Frontier Market Scouts program and work on a summer project in Sri Lanka.

Xiao’ou’s decision to decline the internship surprised officials in the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, but they continued to be interested in her work and contracted her to work on a research project for them while in Sri Lanka. “So I ended up with two simultaneous internships!” Xiao says, adding that she is working on the deliverables for the ministry as part of a directed study with Professor Wei Liang.