Looking for an interesting internship opportunity this fall semester?
Do you love learning?
Are you interested in helping to educate the public in innovative ways?
If so, you may be interested in the following internship with Learning Life…
Note: Inquiries in advance about interning over winter break or spring semester 2014 are welcome.
ABOUT LEARNING LIFE
Learning Life is a non-profit educational project based in Alexandria, VA, in the Washington D.C. metro area, and a program of United Charitable Programs, a registered 501(c)(3) public charity. Learning Life seeks to inform and empower more people by spreading knowledge on the surfaces of everyday life – like volunteer and employment opportunities on tabletop tents in school cafeterias, health and safety facts on posters in public bathrooms and laundromats, poetry and philosophy on cup sleeves in cafes and coasters in bars, science and history on napkins and cereal boxes, etc. – then connecting these surfaces to a world of learning here at Learning Life’s website.
At Learning Life, we work for a world where learning happens in everyday life, not just in school, a world with less inequality and more empowered people because knowledge is everywhere, fun and rewarding. We are looking for motivated volunteer and interns who want to help us build this better world.
ABOUT THE INTERNSHIP
Learning Life is now recruiting responsible, motivated graduate and undergraduate students to help with a variety of tasks including academic and market research, quiz development on a variety of topics, website, design and social media work, and assisting with pilot educational projects.
No experience necessary. Each intern’s precise work will depend on their personal interest, experience and skill as well as organizational need.
Interns must commit at least four hours per week, all or most of which time will be spent working directly with Learning Life founder, Dr. Paul Lachelier, and other interns at a regular time and day each week. Interns are also expected to participate in once-monthly Learning Life staff meetings via Skype, phone conference, or face-to-face.
The internship is unpaid, but available for credit or non-credit, as the intern prefers. Credit interns must secure a sponsoring professor then fulfill whatever academic requirements that professor expects for the course credit. Besides course credit, interns and volunteers alike can gain resume-building experience and a formal reference and/or recommendation letter given satisfactory performance.
HOW TO APPLY
Email your resume to Learning Life at inquiries@letlearninglive.org. We will then contact you to schedule an interview.
Intern Spotlight: Kayla Hamedi
This summer, Learning Life was lucky to have three student interns who contributed valuably to our work. This spotlight series will showcase each of our summer interns, starting this month with Kayla Hamedi.
It doesn’t take long to look at Kayla’s resume to realize she’s an achiever. Kayla, a Maryland resident, delivered the commencement address at her high school class’s graduation ceremony after graduating in the top 5% of her class, earning a number of awards (e.g., Maryland Distinguished Scholar Award Honorable Mention, National Society of High School Scholars Nominee, Scholar Athlete Award), and serving as Class of 2011 Second Vice President, the student newspaper’s Business Manager and News Editor, Persian Club President (her parents hail from Iran) and International Club Vice President, among other roles.
This fall semester, Kayla will be entering her junior year at George Washington University in Washington D.C., majoring in political science and minoring in development studies. At GW, Kayla has an impressive 3.75 GPA, and has been involved with The National Society of Collegiate Scholars, the College Democrats, and Students for Barack Obama. Upon graduating, Kayla aims to go to law school in order to pursue a career advocating for human rights internationally.
Just as Kayla’s resume signaled she’s an achiever, so did her work with Learning Life this summer. Cumulatively, Kayla:
1) Researched and wrote over a hundred facts on varied topics of importance, from identity theft to global warming, for dissemination via Learning Life’s social media outlets.
2) Compiled newspaper advertising rates to compare with Learning Life’s rates for designing, printing and distributing sponsored educational napkins, coasters and other surfaces in the DC metro area.
4) Gathered online opportunities for Learning Life to guest blog
5) Generated a list of selected businesses in Alexandria, VA for Learning Life to contact for possible partnership.
6) Helped increase Learning Life’s number of likes on Facebook and followers on Twitter.
7) Collected notable quotes about education and the importance of information to support Learning Life’s work.
In addition, one of the sometimes lesser appreciated but essential characteristics of any good intern or employee is punctual attendance, and Kayla’s attendance at staff meetings was consistent and punctual, even with a long commute from Maryland to Virginia, where Learning Life is based.
Outside Learning Life, Kayla has, among other things, assisted local food banks in distributing boxes of food to local homeless shelters, tutored students in a variety of subjects, helped re-elect Barack Obama, and most recently joined Homeward Trails Animal Rescue to help find homes for stray, abandoned and rescued dogs and cats.
Asked why she chose to intern with Learning Life, Kayla said, “I feel Learning Life’s work can really make a difference in the way of educating outside of a school environment. The more well-informed our society is, the better we become as a whole, and to be a part of something that promotes that is an honor.”
Thanks, Kayla! We look forward to keeping in touch with you, and seeing you occasionally at Learning Life volunteer events!
This summer, Learning Life was lucky to have three student interns who contributed valuably to our work. This spotlight series will showcase each of our summer interns, starting this month with Kayla Hamedi.
It doesn’t take long to look at Kayla’s resume to realize she’s an achiever. Kayla, a Maryland resident, delivered the commencement address at her high school class’s graduation ceremony after graduating in the top 5% of her class, earning a number of awards (e.g., Maryland Distinguished Scholar Award Honorable Mention, National Society of High School Scholars Nominee, Scholar Athlete Award), and serving as Class of 2011 Second Vice President, the student newspaper’s Business Manager and News Editor, Persian Club President (her parents hail from Iran) and International Club Vice President, among other roles.
This fall semester, Kayla will be entering her junior year at George Washington University in Washington D.C., majoring in political science and minoring in development studies. At GW, Kayla has an impressive 3.75 GPA, and has been involved with The National Society of Collegiate Scholars, the College Democrats, and Students for Barack Obama. Upon graduating, Kayla aims to go to law school in order to pursue a career advocating for human rights internationally.
Just as Kayla’s resume signaled she’s an achiever, so did her work with Learning Life this summer. Cumulatively, Kayla:
1) Researched and wrote over a hundred facts on varied topics of importance, from identity theft to global warming, for dissemination via Learning Life’s social media outlets.
2) Compiled newspaper advertising rates to compare with Learning Life’s rates for designing, printing and distributing sponsored educational napkins, coasters and other surfaces in the DC metro area.
3) Gathered online opportunities for Learning Life to guest blog
4) Generated a list of selected businesses in Alexandria, VA for Learning Life to contact for possible partnership.
5) Helped increase Learning Life’s number of likes on Facebook and followers on Twitter.
6) Collected notable quotes about education and the importance of information to support Learning Life’s work.
In addition, one of the sometimes lesser appreciated but essential characteristics of any good intern or employee is punctual attendance, and Kayla’s attendance at staff meetings was consistent and punctual, even with a long commute from Maryland to Virginia, where Learning Life is based.
Outside Learning Life, Kayla has, among other things, assisted local food banks in distributing boxes of food to local homeless shelters, tutored students in a variety of subjects, helped re-elect Barack Obama, and most recently joined Homeward Trails Animal Rescue to help find homes for stray, abandoned and rescued dogs and cats.
Asked why she chose to intern with Learning Life, Kayla said, “I feel Learning Life’s work can really make a difference in the way of educating outside of a school environment. The more well-informed our society is, the better we become as a whole, and to be a part of something that promotes that is an honor.”
Thanks, Kayla! We look forward to keeping in touch with you, and seeing you occasionally at Learning Life volunteer events!
To learn more about interning or volunteering with Learning Life and other ways you can help, contact us at email@learninglife.info.
Humans are Inertial, Social Creatures: Social Science for Incidental Learning
Learning Life tackles a new frontier of public education. Rather than focus on schools, we seek to nurture a wider public culture of learning by spreading knowledge on the surfaces of everyday life. This approach is rooted in the realities that learning happens everywhere and throughout life, not just at school in one’s youth, and often incidentally not just deliberately. (For more on this, read Learning Life’s credo here, and a blog post on incidental learning here.)
Learning Life’s incidental learning approach is based on insights from social science. Social science research offers interesting and sometimes surprising insights into human behavior that matter for education. Here are two important social science insights that help explain the reasoning behind our approach.
Humans are inertial
Call it efficient, lazy, or else, the fact is human beings tend toward inertia: we like to stay put or do the same thing. This means it’s often difficult to get people to change, or make special efforts. This is not necessarily a bad thing since change can lead to bad outcomes. Further, as scholars Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein note in their insightful book, Nudge (2009), inertia can be nudged to beneficial purpose when we start with good decisions. Thaler and Sunstein raise retirement savings as an example: when the default option employers give to new employees is to reserve a portion of their paycheck for retirement, inertia leads many more workers to start and continue saving for retirement than do so when they otherwise have to elect or opt in to saving.
A parallel can be drawn to education. Educators traditionally expect students to come to school and make deliberate efforts to learn. Effort is of course necessary to learn. But increasingly, one does not have to go to school to learn. More and more universities now offer distance learning and MOOCs (massive open online courses) so students can pursue their education at home or on the go, and at lower cost or free to boot. Going a step further, Learning Life makes it easier for inertial human beings to learn in everyday life by placing free opportunities to learn in their everyday settings, on napkins in restaurants, coasters in bars, cup sleeves in cafes, cereal boxes at home, etc., then connecting these educational surfaces to more information and quizzes at Learning Life online.
The point is this: given human inertia, it is easier to get people to learn when learning materials are free, readily available, brief and inviting, not just locked up in increasingly expensive schools.
Humans are social
Much social science research confirms that human beings are social creatures. That is, we not only are interested in what other human beings are doing, we also like to follow and conform to our fellows and people we look up to. This is true even of “ruggedly individualistic” Americans. Thus, social scientists have found people remarkably inclined to follow peers even when they’re obviously wrong (Asch 1995), to follow orders even when the order is to kill or torture (Milgram 1974, Zimbardo 2007), to get pregnant when peers are getting pregnant (Akerloff, Yelen & Katz 1996), to get grades similar to those of college roommates (Sacerdote 2001), to get fat when friends are fattening (Christakis & Fowler 2007), to vote when told others will find out if one voted or not (Gerber, Green & Larimer 2008), etc.
This basic social science finding that humans are social creatures leads organizations to, among other things, get experts and celebrities to endorse their brand, products and services, make social proof claims like “fastest growing” or “bestselling,” and more recently, use online social networks like Facebook to let you know that your friends, family and acquaintances like them (Cialdini 2001).
There are legitimate debates about the proper use of social science to influence people, but if learning is a virtue we want to encourage more people to engage in, it makes sense to apply social science insights to nurture public education. In this case, knowing that humans are social creatures suggests that educational organizations could use social situations to stimulate more learning. By printing invitations to learning (e.g., stimulating facts plus quiz questions, a puzzle, or riddle about health, history, science or other topic, leading to Learning Life for answers, further learning, fun and reward) on napkins, coasters, cup sleeves, placemats and other surfaces in common social settings, like restaurants, cafeterias, cafes and bars, these invitations can lead to learning and informative discussions among friends, family and acquaintances that might not otherwise occur.
Social science doesn’t just belong in school. To the extent that social science helps us better understand ourselves and our world, we can and should use and spread its insights to improve ourselves and the world. Given education’s importance in our complex, intertwined modern world, applying social science insights to improve and extend public education is arguably paramount, and that’s precisely Learning Life’s priority.
Akerloff, George A., Janet L. Yellen, and Michael L. Katz. 1996. “An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing in the United States.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 111:277-317.
Asch, Solomon. 1995. “Opinions and Social Pressure” in Readings about the Social Animal, ed., Elliott Aronson. New York: W.H. Freeman.
Christakis, Nicholas A., and James H. Fowler. 2007. “The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years.” New England Journal of Medicine 357:370-379.
Cialdini, Robert B. 2001. Influence: Science and Practice. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
Gerber, Alan S., Donald P. Green, and Christopher W. Larimer. 2008. “Social Pressure and Voter Turnout: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment.” American Political Science Review 102:1:33-48.
Milgram, Stanley. 1974. Obedience to Authority. New York: HarperCollins.
Sacerdote, Bruce. 2001. “Peer Effects with Random Assignment: Results for Dartmouth Roommates.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 116:681-704.
Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. 2009. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New York: Penguin Books.
Zimbardo, Philip. 2007. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House.
ABOUT LEARNING LIFE
