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2017 Finalist | Will Turett
"The Researcher"
MEET WILL
IES Abroad Program: Vienna - Society & Culture
College / University: Williams College, Class of 2019
Major: Economics
Hometown: Irvington, New York
HIS STORY
My primary academic interests lie in global relations and development, and accordingly, I have tried to structure my academic coursework and internship experiences around these topics. This exploration has led me to a broad range of development economics and health-related classes at my home university, Williams College, in addition to community service work in Haiti and past internships conducting global HIV/AIDS communications and research at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and managing a citizen journalism program in Tel Aviv aimed at empowering young professionals and students across sub-Saharan Africa.
As I have begun to realize my passion for global citizenship, I am keen to equip myself with the skills and knowledge base to most effectively immerse myself in future experiences. Given the increasingly interconnected nature of our world, having young, ambitious students wrestle with pressing, global issues is critical to ensuring our successful future. I want to produce high social impact work and embraced my abroad experience in Vienna as an opportunity to grow as a learner and cosmopolitan. I am unsure of which path will enable me to best develop and utilize my proficiencies, and wanted to make the most out of my time abroad by bolstering my German language ability and cultural immersion through comprehensive internship.
I began work at the European Environmental Bureau in late-September unsure of my specific assignments and what responsibilities I would be entrusted with during my internship. The EEB is an umbrella environmental NGO based out of Brussels which represents the environmental voice of Europe’s civil society and citizenry. Comprising 140 member organizations across all the EU-member states, it intends to agglomerate and champion civil society interests in the environmentally related proceedings, negotiations, and legislation of the European Union. It is clearly an expansive and impactful organization, and accordingly, I was eager to begin work here and hopefully produce material change by helping them reach certain project goals. Yet equally nervous about the learning curve and to what degree I would be familiar with the content to which I was assigned. Upon my arrival, I was asked to help develop their “Circular Economy Platform Austria”, which as a central database and knowledge exchange center, aims to facilitate an Austrian transition to a circular economy through multi-stakeholder, cross-sectoral engagement.
A circular economy purpose is to minimize waste at every step of the production and consumption process with hopes of creating a self-sufficient economic system that optimally uses natural resources and commodities. Although several European circular economy initiatives are already underway, the creation of the “Circular Economy Platform Austria” would represent a pioneer effort within Austria and the European Environmental Bureau to create a national platform. This project is primarily concerned with catalyzing the transition in Austria, however, since it draws on a diverse pool of best practice examples and research across Europe, if successful it can hopefully be used as a model for replicative EEB-driven circular economy transitions across the EU. This possibility excites me and has motivated to produce my best work. My work will contribute to a project which through generalization or extrapolation can potentially have wide-reaching consequences for Europe and its future environmental landscape.
Our primary piece of writing for this platform is a twenty-page project description outlining our mission, implementation methods, and cooperation partners, as well as a brief background of a circular economy’s intentions and current application in Europe. This project summary has been used thus far to receive sponsorships to financially aid our platform’s creation and will be the primary information we provide to potential stakeholders and investors in the future. Currently, we only have a German version of this writing, which prevents us from sharing this project and receiving broad support from individuals and organizations in non-German-speaking countries. To increase our outreach within the EEB network and with other societal actors (whether from industry, civil society, or government) invested in a circular economy transition, it is important for us to have a more accessible English version. I was tasked with completing a thorough English translation which would keep the intrinsic value of the German version while reframing the argument to be appropriate yet powerful in English.
After finalizing a distributable version, I switched gears slightly and began working on collecting Europe-wide research on related environmental subfields to help inform the construction of our platform. A concern across Europe in science and specifically in environmental research is that the incongruous and unconnected nature of various undertakings results in research being redundantly replicated or not shared with the necessary audiences. There is a strong push by the EU and European scientific communities to fashion cross-sector, cross-industry platforms and databases to enable greater knowledge sharing and its resultant spillover benefits. My personal gathering of research on the fields of bioeconomy and plastics will hopefully enable us to learn from best practice examples and inform our outreach to and communication with potential stakeholders in this transition.
The culmination of this my internship experience occurred when I was fortunate enough to travel to Edinburgh to attend the EEB’s annual conference, which brought together 400 environmentalists from civil society, academia, and government to discuss the most pressing European environmental issues. This trip was truly incredible and afforded me the ability to more critically consider and interact with the European environmental community. I was able to sit in on lectures and panel discussions held by leading European environmental scientists, national ministers of agriculture and environment, and presidents of the largest environmental NGOs in Europe. I believe I was both the youngest participant and only American at this conference. The ability to experience such a robust gathering of European environmentalists from an outside and unique perspective was profound and unforgettable.
During the semester I began a second internship at European Forum Alpbach (EFA), an Austrian NGO which hosts one of the largest and most diverse annual European political/ socioeconomic conferences. EFA brings together roughly 5,000 individuals from between 70 and 100 countries over a three-weekend convention in late-August. Every year they have eight multi-day symposia spanning a broad range of pressing societal issues, and additionally hold lectures, working groups, and networking events to promote collaboration and European cross-communication. An important component of EFA’s work is the issuing of scholarship and fellowship opportunities for students, journalists, and young professionals to come together and attend this conference. For this organization, I have been trying to improve our outreach capabilities in America to both garner grant funding through American sponsors and to increase the quantity and quality of American scholarship applicants. This undertaking involved researching large American sponsors/funds focused on global development and American-European relations as well as determining ways to most effectively establish contact and partnerships with top American institutions of higher learning. I personally plan on attending this conference by scholarship next year and would love to make this opportunity known and accessible to similarly globally-minded American students.
These experiences were diverse yet similarly valuable. In both, I was able to speak German in a highly professional environment and learn from the cultural differences my coworkers brought forth. However, my primary takeaway from these experiences was not one of concrete language or cultural learning, but instead feeling increasingly connected to a globalizing world and recognizing the role (however small) I can play in solving the diverse, cross-national problems facing our world. I hope to carry these experiences with me as I strive to be an agent for global change in my future endeavors. I realize these internships were only small stops on the road of my hopefully long and impactful career, yet it is through these abroad opportunities that I have solidified my interest in international work and aim to embody a “global citizen". I now plan on taking environmental coursework at Williams, returning to Austria next summer for European Forum Alpbach 2018, and am more confident in my desire to write a global development-related senior thesis and pursue a Master’s Degree in Public Health or Public Administration in International Development.
Feeling inspired? Meet all of our 2017 Global Citizen of the Year Finalists and Winner, and learn more about this Award.
