Just a short and sweet update to say that I will officially be interning at the Peace Corps’ press relations office this spring! I am very excited; I think it’ll be a wonderful opportunity to continue to develop and refine my communications skills and as well as provide me with some great “real world” experience.

Not to mention, the commute is half the distance of that to my current internship at Amnesty International, and there are some great places around the office to get lunch at. I think this will be a pretty sweet internship! I can’t wait to start in January.

My first day as a media relations intern at Amnesty International included the following: a protest outside of the Department of Justice and an orange jumpsuit.

I guess you could say that those items are a little out of the ordinary when it comes to your typical media relations internship.

In the days leading up my first day¹, the media relations unit had been hard at work at contacting and pitching the media to generate a buzz about an Amnesty International-organized protest. The protest was to call on the US Attorney General to hold former vice president Dick Cheney accountable for possible war crimes committed during the Bush administration’s “war on terror.” The timing of the protest coincided with the release of Cheney’s memoir, in which he essentially condones acts of torture such as waterboarding.

I arrived at the Department of Justice promptly at 11a.m. and was handed an orange jumpsuit. Then, I was informed I would wear the jumpsuit and join the other protesters and Amnesty International staff in holding the huge banner that proclaimed, “We demand accountability for torture. Attorney General: investigate former vice president Cheney’s role in torture.” While we held the sign, various media outlets covered incident. The whole protest culminated in a Department of Justice spokesperson being presented with a copy of Cheney’s memoir and a letter demanding that he be held accountable for any war crimes he may have committed.

Now, after this experience, I can say that I have taken part in a DC protest and worn an orange jumpsuit. Hey, they even happened at the same time!

It was definitely a one-of-a-kind first day. (In an awesome way, of course.)

Also posted to the AU Interns blog.

1. It was pure coincidence that my first day was the date of the Cheney protest. [↩]

Yesterday I received the news that I will be interning at Amnesty International’s media relations unit during the fall semester. To say that I am excited is a huge understatement; I’m beyond stoked. I’ve dreamed of working at Amnesty International since I was a little kid and my mother shared stories about events such as Tiananmen. The very idea that I’ll now be interning in Amnesty International’s DC office is one that I find incredibly hard to wrap my head around. The 14-year-old me who decided on the topic of human rights in China for a class project wouldn’t have believed that I’d be interning there seven years later, either.

I’ll be starting in exactly two weeks. I’ll have an orientation to attend, and then I’ll start my position as an intern in the media relations unit. I can’t wait!!