Summer Internship Spotlight: Priya Parikh (MBA-MSFS ’23)

Each year, Georgetown McDonough students spend their summers in Washington, D.C., across the nation, and around the world working in corporate, nonprofit, and government organizations. Meet a few of our graduate and undergraduate students in our 2022 Summer Internship Spotlight series.

Tell us about your summer internship.

This summer I interned with Sesame Workshop, the non-profit behind Sesame Street, and various other social impact programs. I was the summer associate for the International Social Impact team within the organization, which has a broad portfolio that ranges from creating the many international versions of Sesame Street to contributing to the humanitarian response efforts in Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Venezuela.  

How did your internship relate to your professional or personal interests? 

I came to Georgetown McDonough after five years of working in the global health space. I knew I wanted to stay in social impact, but I was hoping that I could get professional experience fulfilling different technical roles or capacities during my time at Georgetown. This internship was exactly what I was hoping for because it allowed me to explore a different sector of international development and a more strategy-focused role than any of my prior work.

How did you find the internship?

I found the internship through LinkedIn. I had several job alerts set up for various social impact keywords and found this internship posting through one of those searches. 

What’s the most interesting or impactful thing you worked on during your internship?

With this internship, my main project was to define emerging shifts in media and early learning and then analyze how these shifts would impact the operations and strategy of the organization’s international social impact work in the coming years. It was really interesting to look at this intersection of media and education, and then consider how the organization could leverage new technologies, funding opportunities, and strategies to further its mission of helping kids grow smarter, stronger, and kinder across the globe. 

What did a typical day look like?

I had a hybrid internship. I mostly worked remotely from Washington, D.C., but I was able to go up to the office in New York City a few times throughout the summer. A typical day usually included a couple of meetings with my team and then a lot of research, either finding resources online or talking with internal and external stakeholders that fed into my final analysis. 

What advice do you have for other students?

If you are looking at social impact internships, try not to get discouraged during fall recruitment when it feels like everyone else is securing internships. Use that time to explore options, apply to relevant opportunities, and connect with people in different social impact roles so that you can figure out what you do and don’t want from your summer internship.