I am interning at the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), a legal and social services nonprofit based in Texas. As a Development Intern, I have been working on reviewing the organization’s donor communications strategy by creating a database and auditing email fundraising campaigns. As a prospective International Affairs student, I’ve found that a lot of what I’ve learned about law, international norms, social movements, etc. have helped me to contextualize the work that RAICES does and understand its urgency. Specifically, I took AMS101: America Then and Now in the fall, where I got to learn about the asylum-seeking process in America. RAICES’ work centers on helping immigrants to obtain asylum, so while analyzing their donor communications, I noticed the incorporation of some of the concepts that I learned in class.
At the same time, my first project of the internship was very much a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods, as I analyzed emails for their written content while also statistically analyzing trends. This experience made me realize the importance of quantitative methods even in humanitarian work, which I didn’t think a lot about in the past. I will be taking my first statistics class this coming fall, and I feel like this internship has given me an idea of how statistics is applied in the real world.
*Written previously, but uploading all 3 posts at once.
1 Comment
The work that you are doing sounds really fascinating and exciting that it connects to real classroom learning that you have done at Princeton. I, too, have been combining a mix of quantitative and qualitative research in my work this summer so I found these reflections very pertinant.