From Intern to Employee

April 14, 2014

Kelly (Franquemont) Shiohira, GED’12, travelled to Johannesburg, South Africa, for her internship with the Molteno Institute for Language and Literacy, a nongovernmental organization that operates literacy projects throughout Africa.

Young woman standing outside.
Kelly (Franquemont) Shiohira, GED’12, went from intern to employee at the Molteno Institute for Language and Literacy in Johannesburg, South Africa.

When the organization allowed her to select the focus of her work, she chose to study Molteno’s use of self- reflection practices, such as journaling, aiming to show how teacher trainers and coaches can improve their performance and evaluate their own progress by regularly reflecting on their efforts. Shiohira was asked to formally present the results of her research to the organization’s upper management at the end of her internship, as well as to facilitate a workshop on fundraising, organizational efficiency, and marketing, topics that senior staffers at Molteno told her were the main challenges of the organization.

“The CEO and director of the R&D department were both impressed by my work, and they offered me a position before my internship ended,” says Shiohira. She joined the staff of the Molteno Institute as a research and development officer in January 2013, becoming one of the many IEDP students who have parlayed an internship into a full-time position.

She fondly recalls her GSE classmates, crediting them as an integral part of the experience. “IEDP is an amazing program because of the diversity,” says Shiohira, who has enrolled in a master’s program in linguistics at South Africa’s Rhodes University and eventually intends to pursue a Ph.D. in educational development. “If you look at my class, we all had different backgrounds, and different but complementary interests.”

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2014 issue of The Penn GSE Magazine.

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