Name: Maia Halle
Class Year: 2024
Major: Political Science
Minor: Japanese (at Haverford)
Hometown: Tokyo, Japan
Internship Organization: New York University
Job Title: Research Assistant
Location: New York, NY
What's happening at your internship? We would love to hear what kind of work you are doing!
Currently, I have been reading candidate manifestos from 1980 to 2000 to see which Liberal Democratic Party candidates have promised to bring back money or have brought back money to their home districts. By doing this, I have seen my vocabulary grow, and the number of Chinese characters I can read increase.
Why did you apply for this internship?
I applied for this internship because I wanted to improve my research skills. However, I chose to work with my professor specifically because I thought our research interests aligned well. Lastly, the opportunity to use my Japanese in a work setting really appealed to me.
Was there anything special about how you found this internship?
I found this internship through cold emails. I focused my search on research universities in New York and professors in Japanese, political science, and international relations departments. From there, I cold-emailed professors explaining who I was, my past research experiences, and how my interests aligned with theirs.
Can you talk about the skills you are learning and why they are important to you?
Through this internship, I have learned a lot about aggregating data and presenting it in an accessible way. These skills are important to me as a rising senior because the research skills that I have developed during this summer will help me during my research-based political science courses, including my senior thesis. In addition to past internships, I think that my experiences outside the classroom have taught me so much about the process of creating a research paper. This includes but is not limited to creating an annotated bibliography, collecting primary sources, and presenting data.
Visit the Summer Internship Stories page to read more about student internship experiences.