Hi everyone,

Nancy and Caitlin here! It’s almost a year since we started our internship with the ICS project and now we are in our final week- how time flies!

Looking back, neither of us imagined that the 3 month internship we started on would turn into a yearlong project, but we are so happy it did. Through our involvement with ICS, we have been given so many opportunities to gain new skills, work as part of a brilliant team and create initiatives that we are proud of.

It seems odd to try and condense a year’s work into a short blog post, but we’re going to try! Starting with redesigning the website, we believe that we have created a blog that is more interactive and that serves as a good platform for disseminating information about the ICS scheme and bringing people together through the project’s work. We later on also developed a workshop that raises people’s awareness about cultural differences that was not only informative but also really enjoyable both for us and for the participants. In addition to this, although the task of organising a festival seemed daunting at first, we were so happy with how WOW turned out. We didn’t imagine that what started as a few ideas scribbled in our notebooks would turn out to be an event that attracted over 300 people, hosted over 40 activities and brought community members from within and outside the university together to celebrate the cultural diversity of Southampton. Following the success of the festival, we were excited to be invited to host another event ‘The Intercultural Café’. While this event was much smaller than WOW, we loved being able to bring people together to engage in intercultural exchange and we hope that the foundation that we have laid will serve as a good guide for the sessions to be run in the future. In the past couple of months, for the final stage of our internship, we have been mainly office based, but this has really helped to strengthen our skills in writing and researching and through this we have been able to create resources that we hope will prove useful for the future of the project.

We consider ourselves really lucky to have worked on a project that enabled us to gain skills in team working, marketing, recruitment, logistic, managing money, bid writing and many more. We only have Ali, Jill and the rest of the LLAS team to thank for what was such a brilliant first experience of the world of work.

Although our time with ICS is coming to a close, we are really happy to know that there will be 3 more interns joining the project team this summer to bring their skills and new ideas to the project. We’ll certainly be keeping up with their developments through the ICS blog, and we hope you will too!