Summer Internships: Teaching Girls in Brazil

Samantha Pride
IDSC, Class of 2013

My summer home is in the city of Salvador, Brazil, where I was an exchange student for one year during high school. I am very close to some beautiful beaches and even though it is winter here, the temperature is around 85°F everyday!  

In my position, myself and another teacher from Columbia University are responsible for planning and instructing English classes to 75 Brazilian girls from the ages of 8 to 13 at a nonprofit organization called Bahia Street. 

I have been aware of the Bahia Street organization for over a year. The purpose of their work is to break the cycle of poverty through the education of girls in the form of an academically focused after-school program. From working at Bahia Street, I have seen firsthand how important their work is in the community and how it continues to change the lives of girls’ and their families. In addition to teaching, I am also conducting research independent of Bahia Street on Brazilian women’s attitudes towards female politicians after the election of their President Dilma Rousseff in 2011.

The Brazilian coastline in the state of Bahia.

Lacerda elevator, originally built in 1873, in Salvador's Historic Center.

Near São Francisco church in Salvador.

There are many challenges to overcome in this situation, from making English relative and fun for the different age groups and levels, to working within a small nonprofit. The biggest challenge for me is to prepare lessons in Portuguese that keep the girls involved during the entire class. I have learned from working at other nonprofits that flexibility and a positive attitude really do go a long way and it is no different with my current experience.

Development Theory and Project Management are two courses that have helped prepare me for this internship.  The nonprofit that I am interning with is currently going through some changes and I am observing the discussions and steps developing around the organization’s mission, culture, and funding. Those courses introduced me to a critical thinking of development and projects and as a result, I am able to grasp more fully the situation and discourses happening in front of me. 


Education Policy for Developing Countries was another course that provided me with the material and time to do a great deal of research on the Brazilian education system. The research, along with my internship, has increased my awareness of the quality, practices, and current policies of education in Brazil which has led me to fully understand the difficulties that these girls are up against. 

Summer Internships: Mapping Fires for NASA

Rachael Maingot
GISDE, Class of 2013

This summer I'm working with NASA's DEVELOP National Program at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, VA.  I am part of a team of eight students of various academic backgrounds tasked to develop maps of fire severity and ecological forecasting of the two largest fires in the North Carolina 2011 fire season.  We are using remotely sensed data from multiple NASA satellites, as well as other platforms, to analyze the fuel load and burn damage from peat fires. I live two blocks away from the cleanest beach in Hampton. Whoo! I definitely have taken advantage of the beach by reading there after work and spending weekends with co-workers swimming in the Atlantic. 

North Carolina fire in 2011

North Carolina fire in 2011

Nasa is awesome and I feel very lucky to be close to so many NASA scientists who are passionate about their research and are so willing to teach students. I am excited to learn new skills on how to work on a team to find solutions for a real client. We have the opportunity to create materials for the NC Department of Agriculture to aide in their constant fire struggles, and these materials could actually make a difference for the citizens of North Carolina. I am also excited about learning more skills towards professional growth and making networking contacts to help my career in GIS. Lastly, I am eager to learn how to apply all that I have learned on analyzing raster data on two software programs, ArcGIS and ERDAS, that I have not had much experience working with yet for raster data. All of my GIS-based classes at Clark have helped me prepare for this, though the largest assest to this internship was the Advanced Remote Sensing class because it introduced me to several raster applications and multiple software programs that I will be utilizing this summer. 

-Rachael Maingot, GISDE 2013

Summer Internships: Mapping in Oregon

Jacob Wasilkowski
GISDE, Class of 2013

As a GISDE student, some my main interests lie in communicating geospatial information and involving myself with new developments in cartography.  I feel lucky to have found an internship doing just that.  Right after the semester ended, I flew out to Oregon State University to work with Dr. Bernhard Jenny in his Cartography and Geovisualization Lab.  I have been assisting with two main projects, particularly "Pseudo-natural maps" and "Scale-adaptive web maps".

I feel it's best to explain the purpose of the first project by quoting the website description: "The aim is to develop a more engaging and expressive map style that web mapping services can offer in addition to their traditional vector and satellite mapping modes."  I have been testing out some map designs in Adobe Photoshop and also finding ways to automatically build maps from data available at http://www.openstreetmap.org/  This is a large-scale project that will certainly continue to develop and progress after I return to Worcester.

The second project focuses on providing dynamically changing map projections for web map users, and I have been helping to test this functionality on mobile and tablet (e.g. iPad) browsers.  Though there aren't any public demos available right now.

Here are a few links to the projects I mentioned:

Pseudo-natural Maps: http://cartography.oregonstate.edu/pseudo-natural/index.html
Scale-adaptive Web Maps: http://cartography.oregonstate.edu/scaleadaptivewebmaps.html

Additionally, they provide free downloads to software that's been created within this lab group, which is great for anybody interested in geography and mapping:  http://cartography.oregonstate.edu/software.html

- Jacob Wasilkowski, GISDE 2013