academic internships

Grow your professional and intercultural communication skills, and boost your resume in the heart of Rome!

Throughout the year, the Borromini Institute offers a rich variety of customized academic internships in Rome. Our academic internships are field‐based learning experiences that combine study, observation, and hands-on work with an external organization. An internship experience abroad can give you a competitive advantage for your future career. It will enable you to strengthen your intercultural communication skills, grow your international network, learn how to successfully navigate a new linguistic and cultural environment, gain new hard skills, and acquire a better understanding of best business practices.

One of the great advantages of conducting an internship abroad through the Borromini Institute is that our Learning Facilitator will work with you to secure a custom internship placement based on your background, expertise, and needs prior to your arrival in Rome. During your internship period, you will then have the continued support of the Borromini Institute’s Learning Facilitator in addition to an internship site supervisor.

Internships are part-time, for academic credits, and with a focus on developing skills and academic insights in new settings, languages, and cultures and are as such unpaid. All on-site internship experiences will always be paired with a concurrent research project to be submitted to the Borromini Institute’s Learning Facilitator in order to complete and receive academic credit for the internship experience.

Possible internship placements

Below you will find a selection of some of the fields of past internship placements organized by the Borromini Institute. Please note that not all placements are available on a permanent basis due to several factors such as the time of year in question (fall/spring/summer), the needs of an organization at any given time, as well as a students’ own interests and capabilities.

Application Process

During the study abroad application process, interested students submit their resume and a cover letter describing their background, interests, goals, and preferences for placement areas. See below for advice on how best to compose your resume and cover letter.

The information that the student provides will offer initial guidelines for the Borromini Institute Learning Facilitator, who conducts an application review and a remote interview with the student upon acceptance into the program. The main purpose is to understand the student’s personal, academic, and professional needs and expectations as well as to assess their level of maturity and readiness to ensure a beneficial internship abroad experience. 

The student will then receive 1-2 possible placements which they can rank according to their preference. While Borromini Institute may not be able to guarantee students’ first choice, every effort will be made to place them in their desired field. Placements will be explored but not arranged or finalized until the student has accepted the internship placement. When a match has been made, learning outcomes, tasks, and expectations will be designed together with the Borromini Institute staff and the internship placement supervisor.

Resume Tips

Your resume is designed to sum up your educational and professional background for your employers, and will be a useful tool for Borromini Institute staff to understand the type of internship placement and specific tasks you are interested in. It can also be a deciding factor for our partner organizations that sponsor academic internships in the selection of future interns. We recommend a 1 page resume maximum, that includes the following key information:

• Personal Information: name, phone number, university email, and home address
• A Short Profile Statement (about 100 words): where you present your abilities, achievements, career goals, and ambitions. This is particularly useful if you are a young professional without a long list of professional experiences and want to communicate the capabilities you bring and the professional path you envision for yourself.
• Your Education: both university and high school including any courses you have done while highlighting or specifying the ones that prepared you most for the position.
• Your Professional Experiences: list all your previous professional experiences in chronological order from most to least recent alongside brief descriptions of the tasks included within your work role. 
• Skills Section: Relevant qualifications include languages you speak and their levels, anything computer related, good qualities about your performance at work (that you can actually do, of course).

Cover Letter Tips

When applying for an internship through the Borromini Institute, your cover letter will be a key component in understanding the type of placement you are interested in and the range of tasks you would like to engage in. Given that this cover letter will be shared foremost with Borromini Institute staff to then distribute to potential internship partners, it is best to describe the type of organization with whom you would like to collaborate in general terms (e.g., a refugee aid organization, a social cooperative, an art gallery) as well as the type of work you are both interested in and capable of executing (e.g., social media content creation, community engagement, marketing research etc.). From there, your cover letter ought to address in greater specificity the prior experiences you have had which you feel have prepared you well for such tasks.

Your cover letter should include:

• Your full name and contact information in the header
• The letter should be addressed with “To whom it may concern”
• Opening/Introductory paragraph
  • Here you should explain why you are interested in applying for an internship position with a particular organization type 
• Middle paragraphs
  • Write a summary of your career and your qualities. This should include your experience and your achievements in previous jobs or maybe even in your degree or personal life.
  • Take the chance to expand on something in your resume and/or include specific examples.
  • Talk about why you are the right person for the job position, not why you want it. Convince them you are the right choice and be specific in the types of tasks that interest you.
• Concluding paragraph
  • Express your gratitude for the reader’s time and consideration and reiterate your enthusiasm to further their organization’s mission and goals.