"Fieldwork gave me valuable experience and has made me attractive to employers"
Do you dream of working internationally? Read about how Janna (25) utilized her experiences from three semesters with Kulturstudier on her path to a job with WHO in Kenya.
This text is translated using AI.
View the original article here.Are you among those who aspire to an international career, where you have the opportunity to get to know other cultures and work together with people from all over the world?
The experiences you gain as an international student, can be the catalyst for you to build the network and opportunities needed to realize your dream.
– After high school, I was eager to study, but I also wanted to travel. Therefore, I started looking for opportunities that could combine both, and that's how I discovered Kulturstudier.
– After my first semester of Development Studies 1 in Vietnam, I realized that this program was perfect for me. I greatly appreciated the opportunity to live abroad and gain authentic local insights through professors who were either from the area or had extensive experience in the region.
After the semester in Vietnam, you can continue with Development Studies 2 in Ghana, which builds on what you have learned in Development Studies 1 and focuses on development in Ghana and West Africa.
– This was the most educational semester for me. We conducted fieldwork for three weeks in a small fishing village, a place where no other students had been before. We interviewed about 80 people, and organized focus groups with both fishermen and teachers.
– We discovered that external actors had been fishing in their waters, resulting in reduced resources for the village.
To compensate, the fishermen had to go further out to sea, which was dangerous since many of them could not swim. These external actors also used toxic substances to catch fish, which unfortunately led to self-poisoning. These were some of our groundbreaking findings.
Language skills are of course also beneficial if you want to work internationally. Learning a world language like Spanish opens up opportunities not just for work in Spanish-speaking countries, but also in international organizations where you can more easily collaborate with colleagues who speak Spanish.
– The year with development studies sparked my interest in international politics, and after four intense years of undergraduate and graduate studies, a semester in Argentina to improve my Spanish was a natural next step.
– I want to highlight the fieldwork in both Vietnam and Ghana, which were truly unique experiences. It gave me valuable experience early in my career and has made me attractive to employers.
I am currently working for the World Health Organization (WHO) in Kenya, where I cover the entire continent in their emergency program. I also had the opportunity to work for one and a half years at WHO's regional emergency program in Jordan before coming to Kenya.
I have several colleagues from Ghana with whom I still discuss the findings of the fieldwork, and I deeply value the experience and knowledge I gained at such a young age.
