Sorcha Whitley

I'm a senior at Stanford studying international relations, and I spent this past summer working at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Science at the University of Tartu in Estonia. My academic focuses are international security, Eastern Europe, and democracy and development, so this internship was really an amazing opportunity for me. I visited the capitals of all three Baltic states, and as part of the internship I got to see the Ministries of Foreign Affairs in Riga and Tallinn, and hear about the political landscape and the process of governance in these countries from people who helped shape it. It was, quite seriously, a life-changing experience.

While working in Tartu, I was given the opportunity to present at a conference in Narva, an Estonian town which is on the Russian border and a Russian-speaking community. Other than giving me a chance to practice my Russian, this allowed me to speak to people who have family in Russia they visit, or used to visit, every weekend; people who used to live in Russia but come to work across the river; people who grew up when there was no border, and crossing the river between Narva and Ivangorod didn't require spending five hours in customs. They have a completely different perspective to anyone I might speak to back home, or even anyone I might see on Estonian television, and without this internship, I never would have heard it. I wouldn't have even thought to consider it.

At the University of Tartu, I also helped run a summer school focused on the rebuilding and revitalization of Ukrainian cities after the war. All of the students were Ukrainians living and studying in Ukraine, mostly in Dnipro and Kiev. One night, a fire alarm went off in the dormitory building, and immediately, they all picked up bags they had pre-packed with essentials and started making contingency plans. They thought the alarm was an air raid siren, and that Russia was bombing Estonia. They were terrified that the war had followed them across the border, and they didn't believe me when I tried to reassure them it hadn't until the fire truck pulled up to the curb. Over the course of the week, they told us stories about their homes both before and after the war—what Ukraine is like, not as a country on a map, but as a place where people live, work, and go to school. It impressed upon me what it's like to live in a place where the threat of war is not halfway across the planet but in your own home, and how little most of us in America really know about it. After the SGS internship, though, I know a little more.