Virtual Internship Stories: Owen Doherty

September 14, 2020

Name: Owen Doherty
School: General Studies ‘21
Major: Classical Studies
Center: Rio
Internship: Research Assistant; Office of the Mayor of Teresina, Brazil

Introduce yourself! What’s your name, major, and where are you from?
My name is Owen Doherty. I’m a rising senior in GS in the Dual Degree Program with Science Po. My major is Classical Studies, and I grew up, currently am in, Boston right now.

For whom are you interning and through which Global Center?
I’m currently working with the Office of the Mayor of Teresina, Brazil. It’s a city of about a million people in northern Brazil, obviously through the Global Center in Rio.

Tell us a little about your work. What are some things you are dealing with in your department?
Essentially, my job as a research assistant is to look into the effects of COVID-19 particularly from an economic perspective, so looking at the impact on taxes and revenue for the city, how increased medical expenses have to be paid. Doing a lot of research work in that vain. I guess our big project that we’re working towards is to write an academic paper that actually compares the situation with coronavirus in Teresina with an American equivalent. We basically decided on Indianapolis, Indiana. It’s been a lot of research, going through Excel spreadsheets of city budgets, and a lot of things like that. But also a lot of policy analysis, looking to see where all the money that gets passed from a national and federal level in both Brazil and the US, seeing where that goes, seeing how that comes down to the cities. It’s been quite interesting, and we’ve also been working with the National Front of Mayors in Brazil, as well, which is a coalition of mayors who are nowadays very active in pushing for certain policy objectives when it comes to Brazilian stimulus packages, in particular.

What does your role entail? What are some of your daily responsibilities?
I love it. It’s really flexible, which is good, so I’ll get on a Zoom call a few times a week with my supervisor or point-of-contact and go over things that I’ve researched. He’ll give me ideas in which we can kind of take this academic paper which we’re brainstorming. I’ve had some calls with other members of city government in Brazil, which has been really helpful because they’ve come and given us feedback on our direction and what we might want to look at. They’ve been great at giving us access to resources and data and figures. It’s great because this is just a very flexible internship. I obviously have goals that I set and try to accomplish—I’ll look into this one aspect of coronavirus relief one day and be able to debrief that the next meeting, create a presentation that can be translated into Portuguese for other city workers and policy makers in Brazil to help inform future stimulus packages on the federal level or even just how to manage low tax revenues, for instance. It’s a variety of things, which is great, and it’s been a lot of fun so far.

Considering changes made to numerous students’ employment plans, were you originally planning on working on a similar project this summer?
Actually, no. It wasn’t something that I had planned on. Like I said, I’m in the Dual BA program with Science Po, and my major over there, for that degree, was in Politics and Government. I’ve always had an interest in politics. You wouldn’t know it from me being a Classics major at Columbia, but I’ve always had an interest in that, so throughout the winter and spring I was looking for internships that would help me get involved in politics and do research into politics and not as much on the financial side. Numbers kind of scare me as a humanities and social sciences major, so I never thought that’d be something that I’d be interested in. But the good thing is that with this internship, it’s a little bit of an intersection of policy and economics. It’s not this really, super crazy, complicated equations, or anything. It’s just a lot of data and analysis of pretty accessible numbers, and it’s just seeing what kind of resources are available, how they get spent. It wasn’t totally what I had anticipated especially, too, because I didn't have a lot of experience on the local level of politics. Learning about how property taxes work in different countries, learning about just how local government actually functions has been really eye-opening and something that I hadn’t really had that much exposure to before but is something that is definitely really interesting and really underappreciated and super important in people’s lives.

How would you compare the experience of a virtual internship to a more traditional, in-person internship?
When you’re on site or in-person, I think there’s definitely—not that there’s someone always hovering over you—but by nature of being there, you feel like you have a purpose or goal to accomplish every second of the day, which is good. Coming into this, even though it’s very flexible, I was worried that I would have problems managing time and trying to figure out how I was going to approach all the work I was going to for this internship. I really have found that it’s good because as long as you enjoy the work, it’s something that I don’t feel like is a chore. I don’t feel like I have to get out of bed and go to a nine to five that’s on site. It’s very enjoyable. I can sit outside when I’m doing my research. I can take a break for lunch. It’s a little bit more laid-back, which I really appreciate, but it’s just a different speed, I think, and I appreciate that. Sometimes you just need to slow down a little bit.

Do you have any tips for future virtual interns?
I would say that virtual internships have—they’re obviously less structured like I said than on site, in person internships—and so I think that because of that, it’s important to set goals for yourself and what you want to accomplish and be very clear about those from the outset. If I had just taken a super laid-back approach and was kind of like, “Oh, I’ll get to that in a couple days or whenever I get to that, or whenever I feel like it.” That doesn’t really work. You have to say “on Monday, I will spend most of my time looking at this. On Tuesday, I will move on and go to this. By Wednesday when I have my call with my supervisor, I can present it this way. You have to be very disciplined. You have to provide the structure yourself and make sure that you’re able to handle everything that you need to handle and everything that you need to do and what’s expected of you on time and do it well and not just be rushing in the ten minutes that you have to report what you’ve done.