UC Santa Barbara's Graduate Student Internship Fellowship assists graduate students with attaining experience related to career goals and professional development. This funding is made possible through the GSA referendum fees and additional support from the Graduate Division, under the leadership of Career Services. 

This spring, Jazmine Exford (PhD student in the Linguistics Department), Lauren Vanderlinden (PhD student in the Music Department), Tymoteusz Chajdas (PhD student in the Global Studies Department), and Yan Liu (PhD student in the East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies Department) were each awarded the 2021 Graduate Student Internship Fellowship. 

Global Studies PhD Student Tym Chajdas is an independent research communicator. During his internship, Tym has been able to build on some of the course-planning skills that he gained during his PhD and expanded them to create comprehensive online courses geared towards audiences of all ages and levels. The internship has also allowed him to bolster his design skills, including video editing and creation of animations, and to better communicate content grounded in research. The internship is helping him to better position himself for the non-academic job market as well as explore educational programming as a crossover between academic research and public communication. He believes that this placement has enhanced his grad school experience due to its applied nature.

Read more about applying for the fellowship here.