Meet the winners of the 2022 Graduate Student Internship Fellowship

Internships can unlock countless opportunities for graduate students to develop job skills that cannot be gained through their graduate studies, but are nonetheless crucial to their career success. UC Santa Barbara's Graduate Student Internship Fellowship assists graduate students with attaining experience related to career goals and professional development. This funding is made possible through the GSA referendum fees and additional support from the Graduate Division, under the leadership of Career Services.

This spring, Chava Nerenberg (PhD Candidate, Department of Counseling, Clinical, & School Psychology), Diego Ratto (PhD Student, Department of Music), Lydia Borowicz (PhD Candidate, Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies), Sylvia Faichney (PhD Student, History of Art and Architecture), and Assatu Wisseh (PhD Candidate, Film and Media Studies Department) were each awarded the 2022 Graduate Student Internship Fellowship. Read on to learn how the five awardees will be gaining new skills in exciting positions at their internships!

Chava Nerenberg

Chava is the Neuropsychological Assessment Extern for Insight Neuropsychology in Ventura, CA. She is excited to gain experience conducting neuropsychological assessments in a private practice setting. This internship will allow her to gain real world experience and to hone her skills in assessment and diagnosis. Chava is excited to use these skills to benefit her future clients! She will gain valuable practice administering and scoring many types of psychological assessments, as well as writing comprehensive reports and delivering feedback and tailored recommendations to clients. She is particularly excited to grow her skills in working with children and families and in being trained to diagnose learning disorders. This experience builds upon the excellent training Chava has received at UCSB. It will enable her to learn specialized skills that will make her a better therapist and more competitive for future job opportunities.

Diego Ratto

Diego is the Assistant (arranger, orchestrator, copyist, proofreader, studio technician, mixing eng.) for The Collective Music & Media Group. He is excited because this is a great opportunity to test his skills in the music industry environment and to learn how to handle projects by achieving high professional results. He is working with a very good team, in a friendly environment which makes the learning process easier and very enjoyable. Furthermore, there was already talk about future development of their collaboration that will probably last even after this summer internship experience. Diego is expecting to increase his technical skills, for example: he is learning how to write for orchestra with pro sound libraries and he is improving his mixing skills by assisting professional mixing engineers. In compositional terms, he is developing his arranging and orchestration technique. Another important skill Diego is learning is to deal with the business side of being a freelance composer (especially how to interpret and create contracts for licensing his own music). More in general, he is expecting also to learn how to handle bigger scale projects and to deal with all the people involved in the film and music industry environment.

Moreover, as an international student, it represents a fundamental point for creating a network here in the United States, where Diego would like to stay, even after his studies at UCSB.

Lydia Borowicz

Lydia is the Curatorial Intern for Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, in Spokane, Washington. She is excited about the opportunity to explore different career paths within her research area and develop skills in public-facing scholarship. Learning new skills from museum professionals and finding non-academic applications for her research will help her when applying to both academic and non-academic positions, and she is looking forward to building professional relationships through this internship. Lydia will be helping to develop a museum exhibit, training in archival research, exhibit development, curatorship, and visitor engagement/education along the way. By participating in the curatorial process, she will learn how to effectively collaborate and translate her academic research to a non-profit and public-facing setting. Lydia hopes to find a job that will allow her to continue pursuing her research area, either in an academic setting or a cultural organization such as a museum. Her work is interdisciplinary, and it is important to Lydia to be able to communicate effectively with people in different fields. This internship gives her the opportunity to work with a range of people in different settings outside a university, and she is hopeful that this will open up new ways of thinking about potential careers.

Sylvia Faichney

Sylvia is the Curatorial Graduate Intern for the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, in Los Angeles. This internship offers her the opportunity to develop her curatorial skills within an institution that engages with a global audience, and with contemporary designers, artists, and architects, through its exhibitions and residency programs. Based in the historic Schindler House on King's Road, it provides her the opportunity to see how a historic home might function as a generative site for contemporary discourse in art and architecture. Sylvia expects to gain practical skills in curating an exhibition, such as installing an exhibit, and working with artists and other collaborators. She also expects to learn how to make historic archival materials accessible to a wider audience. Sylvia has admired MAK Center's exhibitions and programs for some time now and saw this as a chance to gain practical experience in curating, while exploring questions as it relates to her research interests. Such as, why, and how, exhibit architecture? This internship enables her to engage with not only practical skills regarding working at a historic house that exhibits both historic contemporary objects, but also enriches her research questions.

Assatu Wisseh

Assatu is the Digital Curation Intern-Fellow for
the Archives and Special Collections, at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. It is her goal as a digital humanities intellectual to meaningfully incorporate computing in humanities-based research. The UAH Archives and Special Collections is engaged in exciting digital humanities projects such as curating online exhibits and creating mobile apps. It is a great place to grow as a scholar-practitioner. Digital archival practice is Asset's focus. She is working on migrating analog files to digital formats to curate online exhibits accessible to various publics. Practicing online exhibit curation builds proficiency with metadata standards such as Dublin Core and web-based platforms like Omeka and the Oral HIstory Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS). Assatu felt that gaining entry-level skills that most internships offer were not desirable considering her age, experience, and educational level. So she pursued a position focusing on archival practice because it is an advanced and transferable skill set. Also, it augments the experience she has gained in the field of film and media studies, which heavily centers on historiography and archival research.

Congratulations again to all of the recipients! We wish these interns a wonderful experience and look forward to checking back in with them at the conclusion of their work to see what they learned. Stay tuned!

If you are interested in learning how you can get a graduate-level internship, come speak with a career counselor!