Fantastic summer!
This program gave me an amazing opportunity to practice my Spanish as well as further narrow down my professional interests. As someone who was very unsure about what career path I wanted to take before starting the program, I was very flexible about where I wanted to be placed and ended up spending the summer doing a research project in the folklore archives of the Chilean National Library. Through the pros and cons of this job, I came up with a much better idea about what sort of a work environment I want to be in after college. Chile is also a very interesting country and if you want to travel around the country there are several big landmarks that you could go to such as Patagonia or the Atacama desert! I chose to spend most of my time in Santiago, but there was still plenty to see and do there to fill the 8 weeks. IES also took us on several field trips around the city, as well as one to Valparaiso and Viña Del Mar! When I was there, IES was going through some staffing changes so they were running a little behind on internship placements, so everything wasn't completely set in stone until a couple of weeks before the program started, but in the end everything managed to work out and in the end I had a great time!
