Organization and Management Internship of 2019: a Look From the Inside Out
Every summer the students of the Master program in Migration Studies undertake an internship. This internship purposes to improve the received knowledge and skills of the first year of the study. Moreover, the study-practice makes use of a unique opportunity for the students to feel themselves in the role of the field anthropologist included into a research group.
The field season of the summer 2019 enabled the future specialists in migration to collect empirical material for their future Master theses in the different parts as of our country and as abroad. For 2 weeks, Bachtiyor Ussanov became a member of the research-group at Institute of social-political research of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ISPI RAN, Moscow) Together with the colleagues-lectors, he investigated the problems of the «ethnic entrepreneurship». Bachtiyor’s group-mate Shariffjohn Tursunov departed to the Northern capital of Russia. Under the supervision of the colleagues from the Centre of the independent sociological research (CNSI, Saint Petersburg) he collected the field material on the theme of the role of Tadzhik national-cultural autonomies in the field of migration. Two students of our program could get a chance to have an internship abroad. They got a first-hand experience at Police Department in Ust-Kamenogorsk (Kazakhstan) and obtained necessary skills to work with migrants and repatriates within the governmental body. Finally, a part of our students served as interns in Tomsk institutions the activity of which related to the issue of migration and migrants: “The House of Friendship”, “Migration and citizenship” LLC, the Laboratory of Social-Anthropological research. For information, based on the results of the field season, the summary internship conference was successfully organized and led, where the students specialized in Migration Studies shared their experience.
The Head and manager the Master Program “Migration Studies” express their gratitude to the above-mentioned organizations for the collaboration and invaluable experience that our students gained. Below we publish some references of the participants:
“In July 2019, I was doing an organizational and managerial internship at company "OOO Migratsiya i Grazhdanstvo" (“Migration and Citizenship”, LLC). There is a reason why I have chosen this one. The company has been successfully operating for almost 15 years, and has recommended itself as a reliable and professional service provider in the field of migration.
The most part of the clients are foreigners: students, labor migrants and migrants’ families. Since the company has been on the market of intermediary migration services for a long time, its staff has developed friendly and warm relations with many clients. The life-stories of foreign citizens can be too complicated. When unexpected circumstances appear for the first time, the problems are solved using the legislation and requests to the migration department, appeal to the courts, etc.
I convinced one more time that the Master program in Migration Studies realized all my expectations. The interdisciplinary knowledge, habits and competencies, language training, an ability to resolve ethical issues in a conflict situation, to update the necessary knowledge at any time in order to handle issues arising in the workflow – all these capacities helped me successfully complete the internship in the organization. While participating in the daily routine as an intern, I translated personal documents, filled out permit application forms, and provided consulting services to foreign nationals. Kim Evgeny Valentinovich, the Director of "OOO Migratsiya i Grazhdanstvo" (“Migration and Citizenship”, LLC), emphasized an undoubtful up-to-datedness of the program in the context of increasing demands on a new migration strategy in Russia. He highly evaluated the professional level of the graduate’s knowledge”.
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“This year, our Master program organized an internship at Center for Independent Sociological Research (CISR) in St. Petersburg where employees welcomed me so great. From one side, we did not want to bother our colleagues from CISR. From the other side, majority of the CISR staff contributed a lot to our activities.
Olga Brednikova, researcher at the Central Scientific Research Institute, became our head of the internship. She clearly set our tasks:
- to articulate and solve problems arising in the course of scientific research and requiring in-depth professional knowledge;
- to process the obtained outcomes, analyze, and conceptualize them with the available literature data and empirical materials
If something was wrong or did not work out with our daily routine, we organized a round table with our head of the internship and discussed our research with the director of CISR Victor Voronkov as well. Oksana Karpenko and the rest of the CISR staff were always ready to help us.
Serving as an intern, I had an opportunity to meet with the chairperson of the Tajik Diaspora "Ajam" in St. Petersburg Murod Usmanov. During our meeting, we discussed issues related to public organizations and national cultural autonomies. The internship at CISR met all my expectations, I was impressed. For this opportunity, I would like to thank the whole CISR team, who welcomed us there. Hereby, I also want to thank to our program for a chance to have an internship at CISR.
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“I undertook the internship at the Institute of Social and Political Research (ISPI) of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. I did not have a strict schedule, so I could draw up the working plan by myself. I worked at ISPI RAN as a competent collaborator where I had my personal working space. The most part of the time, I conducted a desk research and worked in the archives. As a result, I collected more topical data about the labor activity of foreign citizens, ethnic entrepreneurs, as well and migrants of the whole Russia. I could visit some eastern café on the purpose to eat and watch, and could make clear the specification how ethnic cafes work in Moscow. In the Russian capital, the oriental cuisine is very popular like in Tomsk. I visited «Food-City» – the biggest market in Moscow and saw that all the cafes on the second floor are eastern ones. What is the reason of this fact? After visiting different places of this market, I understood that many salespersons, wholesale workers and loading-workers are the migrants from the Central Asia. While visiting national cafes in Moscow, I took all the notes in my diary. This internship in Moscow let me collect plenty of the information for my Master thesis that assists me to compare Tomsk and Moscow «ethnic cuisine».
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“The internship was gone at the branch of the Regional State Autonomous Cultural Institution “The Center of the popular arts “Avangard” - “The House of Friendship”. The fulfilled work consisted of collecting the empirical material on the theme of the scientific research – national-cultural festivals, in particular, “The Festival of nation’s friendship” in the Tomsk region. I was lucky to watch two main cultural events this summer, i.e. the First All-Russian festival-contest of the amateur on-stage performance groups and the First Interregional festival-competition of Cossack culture “Sibirskaya bratina”. The teams from the Siberian Federal district participated, in particular, from four republics: Khakassia, Tuva, Altai, and Buryatia. The similar events contribute to preserve and develop the cultural potential of national communities in Tomsk and the Tomsk region, to form national originality by means of revival, popularity of cultural customs of the local ethnic groups, to create favorable conditions for the progress of amateur forms of national popular arts”.
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“This summer, I passed the traineeship at the Laboratory of Social Anthropological research under the supervision of Professor Dr. Larisa V. Deriglazova from Tomsk State University. During the practice, I participated in the research of the identity of the European youth. I worked with the exchange students from Italy who studied that time at TSU”.
