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This spring, Jo Palazuelos-Krukowski (Department of Theatre and Dance), Luke Janes (Department of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology), Amanda Gersten (English Department), and Dennis Manjaly Joshy (Mechanical Engineering Department) were each awarded the inaugural Graduate Student Internship Fellowships. Find about more their opportunities here!

By Daniel Elkin, Graduate Career Peer
Wednesday, August 1st, 2018 - 2:45pm

2018 Internship Fellow Awardees (for Emma email) (1)

Internships can unlock countless opportunities for graduate students to develop transferable skills that cannot be gained through their graduate studies, but are nonetheless crucial to their career success. The UCSB Graduate Student Internship Fellowship assists graduate students with attaining experience related to career goals and professional development. This spring, Jo Palazuelos-Krukowski (doctoral student in the Department of Theatre and Dance), Amanda Gersten (doctoral student in the English Department), Dennis Manjaly Joshy (masters student in the Mechanical Engineering Department), and Luke Janes (doctoral student in the Department of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology) were each awarded the inaugural Graduate Student Internship Fellowship. Read on to learn how the ​four awardees will be gaining new skills in exciting positions at their internships!

Jo Palazuelos-Krukowski will be an Assistant Director for Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig's Snow in Midsummer. In the staging of the contemporary adaptation of Guan Hanqing's thirteenth century Chinese ghost play Injustice to Dou E., she is excited to engage her knowledge in ghost performance as a platform for the exploration of social marginality. She is thrilled about working with a talented cast and crew at one of the largest Shakespeare festivals in the United States. The opportunity will allow her to grow and challenge herself as a director, and to gain valuable insights into the production process of a company with an audience size of half a million attendees each year.

Amanda Gersten will be a Summer Intern in social media and special projects at The Feels, an independent web series, which explores issues of queerness, masculinity, and mental health. She looks forward to learning how to take larger issues that interest her in her academic work and present them to a non-academic audience in an accessible way. She will gain hands-on experience in a creative industry where she can learn the ins and outs of social media, hone her skills in storytelling and communication, and harness her interests in activism and writing and editing by documenting the making of the season.

Dennis Manjaly Joshy will be a Summer Intern on the Molecular Diagnostics Team at Vascular Biosciences. He is excited to be learning skills in statistical modeling with the programming language R, and gaining an understanding of the basics of bioinformatics and systems biology, the biology of pulmonary hypertension, and micro-array output. He believes that this knowledge can be applied to noble causes, such as saving lives.


Luke Janes will be an Extern at Child Abuse Listening Mediation (CALM). He is enthusiastic about the chance to conduct individual, group, and family therapy for children, youth, and adults in Spanish and in a non-profit community agency. He will be providing prevention and treatment of trauma through skills he will develop in Dialectical Behavior Therapy and running therapeutic groups, opportunities that are outside of the school system with which he had been previously affiliated.

Congratulations to this year's Graduate Internship Fellows!