by Content Creation Lab youth interns Younes (Algeria) & Heidi (United States)
“At the end I discovered that the GNG’s summer internship had opened doors for me. It showed me how I can turn my efforts and time to a real change that I can see in the future”
As well as improving our leadership skills and teamwork abilities, we learned more about other cultures and have created a great connection that will stay forever.
During this internship, we were two of 20 interns from 6 different countries who worked on developing the online curriculums of the CCL and making them much easier and more accessible to everyone. All interns participated in leadership development sessions where we built our presence and voice as leaders of cross-regional exchange, strengthened our emotional intelligence, deepened our understanding of access and inclusion in instructional design, and explored career options and preferences.
“When we were working on the video production, we were asked to film a short video about our favorite two products bought from a local business and a big corporation. I really discovered how objects differ from one person to another; from books and perfume to CDs and necklaces. That was amazing to learn!”
We were on the same team where we interacted with each other during the internship period in weekly meetings and asynchronous work where we improved our problem-solving skills, critical thinking and a better view of what the world needs from youths.
A permanent part of the weekly meetings was the ice-breakers part. They were the ones that made us know more about each other’s cultures and how each of us is living (our lifestyles, ways of studying, favorite colors and objects…).
“By participating in the internship, I was able to gain real world experience in what goes into creating a curriculum that is engaging, informational, and accessible to people around the world. I was also able to learn so much about my global peers and see how similar we all really are.”
In this summer internship, interns were challenged to design the curriculums that solve real-world problems. (We) both chose to work on this because (we) know that developing these courses is a lifetime investment. (We) know that giving time to improve the quality of these curricula is valuable because (it) will help hundreds and even thousands of youths all around the world. (We) believe that this was the right thing to make a real change in the world.
This journey has been a very intensive experience that has helped us to get to know ourselves and our team better. The weekly meetings were a great mix of thematic inputs, exchange with the other participants and work on ourselves as leaders and as humans in general. This program gave us the tools and the materials to explore questions and find solutions within teams of different people. It made us self-confident that we can make an effective and a real change in the future. The GNG staff succeeded in bringing a very diverse set of people together and created an open and trusting environment for us to learn from each other’s experience and questions. What’s more, we could create lifetime connections with people who soon became so familiar to us. This internship was by no means the final stop: the journey now continues with us. The program helped us to begin and it gave us the right skills to finish the road.
“One way we were encouraged to get to know each other was by having one of the interns post a prompt in our general chat every few days or so to help us get to know each other. It was really cool to see how all of our answers either varied greatly (favorite meals, school subjects, music, and what our yards look like) or were surprisingly similar (favorite sports, hobbies, and movies). I really enjoyed finding others in the internship who shared interests with me, but it was also really cool to learn about other cultures and get to experience some parts of them (like listening to everyone’s favorite song)!”
Global Nomads Group’s Content Creation Lab 2022 Cohort actively created four new Student to Word courses focusing on the important theme of Careers for a Just & Sustainable World: Architecture, Film & Media, Finance, and Medicine & Scientific Research.
