2019 Summer Internship
Dong Eunsue, Political Science and International Relations at Korea University

I did my internship at the East Asia Institute for 5 weeks through the Korea University Summer course internship program. In the morning of the very first day, I talked about my interest in political science to a supervisor in charge of the internship program. I’m interested in both traditional and non-traditional security, so I supported a research associate who studies North Korea and Security. I also did various other tasks such as assessing the current EAI website and then giving some feedbacks. Along with my fellow interns, I presented to President Son and research associates in a meeting, and after the presentation, I saw significant improvement in the website. Additionally, I made a video and a proposal regarding the promotion of Global North Korea, which is an archival website of publications on North Korea launched last year.

EAI holds many kinds of events. The biggest event during my internship was the ‘KF workshop’. EAI invites knowledgeable speakers to give lectures about Korean politics, industry, culture, diplomacy, etc. for three days to foreign resident students. I helped to ensure the workshop ran smoothly for all three days of lectures. It was very interesting and helpful for me, and I got to see foreign resident students asking questions in the lecture and thought it must be helpful and interesting to them.

The tasks I assisted the research associates were to research, translate, and edit ‘North Korean biochemical weapons’ and to do research for the EAI public diplomacy program. I could apply skills I learned during university, and gained more knowledge on topics I was interested in. Additionally, we have a lecture session for interns every week. We listened to lectures from research associates and learned skills from our colleagues in the session. For me, a lecture “History of the Relationship between Korea and Japan” was especially interesting and impressive. I got to know more about what treaties between Korea and Japan were made after the World War Two.

I worked with eight other interns at EAI as well. Each intern comes from different backgrounds so we could help one another and work in a friendly atmosphere. Every research associate was very kind and considerate of the interns. Through my first internship experience in EAI, I had an opportunity to know how an international institute works and what people there do. Specifically, I got more in-depth knowledge of current issues and state of affairs of the international society. Overall, it was good to work with good research associates and intern colleagues.