Internships with .impact: My Experience

As described by Soeren Mindermann in his recent post on working at .impact, internships are available working with some of the most involved .impact members (as well as full-time or part-time jobs, working remotely or in Vancouver). If you’re interested in exploring these, email your CV to tog.ash@gmail.com. This post describes my experience doing an internship with .impact over this summer.

    Overall, I found my internship at .impact to be an interesting and rewarding learning experience. Since the people most heavily involved with .impact have so much work to be done, there is considerable freedom in choosing what you would like to do. For example, I quickly found that I enjoyed editing, so this became a large portion of what I was assigned.

Another advantage of the large amount of work to be done at .impact is that there is essentially no cap on the number of hours you can volunteer. For example, if you have a free weekend, you can spend all day volunteering. Additionally, since there are few hard deadlines, there is considerable flexibility regarding when you can work. I found this extremely helpful as I didn’t have to worry about missing a day or two, provided I made up the time later in the week. Typically, interns are expected to make a firm minimum weekly commitment, however this commitment can be as low as a few hours per week.

Another aspect that sets an internship at .impact apart is that when you work here, you feel like you are working with them rather than for them. Within a week or two after I had started, I felt like I was part of the team, and that my input was as important as anyone else’s. Furthermore, many people working at or affiliated with .impact reached out to me during the first weeks of my internship, and I felt welcomed. Additionally, most employees and volunteers at .impact are younger, which, for me as a high school student, made them a lot less intimidating.

As mentioned earlier, there is a wide variety of work to choose from. Some of my tasks included coordinating group meetups, editing research reports, and doing my own research on practical topics, to name but a few. I also had a number of smaller recurring assignments, such as creating weekly facebook events. All tasks are neatly listed on the website Asana with a description of what to do and a (usually rough) deadline. This is fantastic if you’re as disorganized as me, and also fantastic if you’re organized and like everything in one place.

If you're interested, here are a few tips:

• Tom Ash uses a lot of different websites to coordinate projects. During my time, Asana and Slack were both adopted by .impact for task management and communication respectively. These websites are extremely useful, so make sure you learn how to use them.

• Don’t be afraid to send an email if you’re confused about an assignment; everyone’s very friendly.

• Familiarize yourself with Google Docs/Spreadsheets. A large portion of my work was done using these.