Check out the Internship Process Infographic

• Check out our 2023 Summer Intern Album
  
• Check out our 2022 Summer Intern Album
• Check out our 2021 Summer Intern Album
• Check out our 2020 Summer Intern Album

At the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Freshwater Lab is pleased to announce the Freshwater Lab Internship Program.  Sponsored by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation in Flint, Michigan and the KBIH Family Foundation, the program trains a new generation of water leaders and promotes diversity in environmental work.   

The Freshwater Lab Internship course is open to advanced undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It focuses on water, along with environmental justice, critique of investment and consumption patterns, and natural resource governance. 

The internship program provides professional and career development skills to students. Agencies and organizations who sponsor Freshwater Lab interns benefit from fresh perspectives, new approaches and constituencies, and the high-caliber work of motivated students. Those benefits are widely distributed in the sense that the leadership program better forms a Great Lakes constituency which reflects the range of communities in the watershed. Cultivating leaders entails dynamic education, sustained mentorship and exposure to both pressing issues and innovative solutions. Because the University of Illinois at Chicago draws mostly local students, it is the ideal place to elevate a diverse cohort of Great Lakes leaders.

The Freshwater Lab seeks to strengthen the water community in the Great Lakes basin by working to ensure that water leadership reflects the lived experience of Great Lakes communities.  Our program supports future water leaders in their early stages, removing barriers to entry and deepening bonds between water-focused organizations and the diverse communities of the Great Lakes.  We link student interest and creativity to the urgent threats facing the Great Lakes and drinking water systems, demonstrating the possibilities for growth and social transformation in our watershed.  This program represents the beginning of a generational change in better outcomes at the individual, community and systemic levels in the Great Lakes.