Off to a Good (and Typical) Start: Early internship placements in Marseille

The first handful or so of IFE student experiences are in the books as IFE builds its network of local partners in its new home on the Mediterranean. The early decor will be familiar to IFE habitués: a balanced mix of IFE’s three major areas of social engagement, cultural affairs and socio-cultural research, and all STEM fields. Upcoming sessions will no doubt also see new Marseille placements developed in response to the sort of niche requests IFE finds itself handling such as landscape architecture, animal behavior, costume design, urban agriculture, incarceration policy, oceanography, automotive engineering, and other very specific or technical fields.

The Osiris Center, an NGO offering care, accompaniment and resources for exiles and refugees suffering from psychological trauma, opened its doors to an IFE intern. The student, a psychology major, joined in the work of welcoming those seeking help with the mental distress of exile, conducting preliminary interviews, ensuring triage to determine the best course of action, attending staff meetings to discuss patients, and interacting with the staff of interpreters.

The local agency of the French Office for Immigration and Integration (OFII – the same national office hosting IFE interns in Strasbourg and in the Paris area), also welcomed an intern, a student interested in learning the procedures of regularization, the categories of asylum and other facets of immigration law and policy, as well as subsequent integration assistance through OFII programs.

In the area of social and cultural studies, IFE is particularly proud to begin an association with TELEMMe – a joint laboratory for research on the History, Culture and Society of Southern Europe and the Mediterranean, of the University Aix-Marseille and the prestigious CNRS. TELEMMe researcher Fabien Bartolotti teaches the IFE course on Modern and Contemporary Marseille and Provence, and the institute welcomed an IFE history major as an assistant researcher. As for cultural activity, an IFE intern joined the staff of Marseille’s Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (MUCEM), working in the publishing department, while another student-intern took the opportunity to learn the workings of the Aix-Marseille University Press.

Lastly, but certainly not least in IFE’s big tent, a biology major had the opportunity to work with and learn from both clinicians and researchers at the Institute of Movement and the Musculoskeletal System of Sainte-Marguerite Teaching Hospital.