KIDS.R.OK INTERNSHIP

Are you interested in a short internship role for our project operations in India? Feel free to reach to us and let us know.

Apply for internship:

Here is one of our interns Sheryl Salome S describing her experience

“My experience in Kids.R.OK was a truly fulfilling one. Despite a few hurdles I have learnt several valuable lessons and will cherish all the experiences.

Engaging with the students in the English class was a delight. These classes taught me how creative one needs to be to teach a bunch of teenagers, to stimulate their active engagement and also that you don’t need to see people’s faces to care for them. Teaching English in Tamil was a huge challenge but I was able to adapt and think of different ways to captivate the attention of the kids. Despite the online medium, I was able to personally connect with some of the children and offer help which warmed my heart and I take this as a huge success considering the fact that I don’t even know how most of them look.

The most enriching experience that I had was the mentorship program. It was quite challenging to build rapport initially but once the trust was established, we moved forward smoothly. As the sessions commenced, I was able to see more than what she was saying, actively listen, think about what prompted her to share this particular piece of information and not others, the general idea behind why she was uncovering this issue. In certain issues, I was also able to confront her but since the rapport was already well established it did not cause her to withdraw but made her think, to a certain extent. I’m glad I got the opportunity to be a positive influence in my mentee’s life.

Organizing games and programmes was a new experience for me. One important lesson that I learnt from this was to give priority to cater to the need of the audience and not impose my own wishes. There were several skills that I picked up during the course of the internship like poster designing, video editing, and certificate designing. Some of the techniques learnt in class that I was able to apply and contribute to the organization were positive reinforcements (to ensure that the mentee was on time to her sessions), certain counselling techniques like active listening, confronting, open-ended questions, art work to uncover feelings without actually having to say anything – build rapport, removing cognitive distortions – thoughts on trial, positive coping strategies (art and music) and also a few persuasion techniques like active experience and attitude inoculation in the awareness campaign.

Kids.R.Ok also taught me to sharpen my cognitive skills. I got the chance to observe the dimension in which one ought to think, got a glimpse of that sort of higher-order thinking that is essential to run an organization. Through every single conversation with the Project Manager, I was able to gain a new insight, some of them were related to online counselling, true relationships, and so on.

Something I observed was that despite all the growth in the society, the issues that these children seem to be struggling with are the stereotypical issues like teenage relationship problems and lack of appreciation. I think they need to be educated and taught to rise above these common, basic, stereotypical issues because we can anticipate the occurrence of these, it will not take us by surprise so we have the opportunity to act!”

December 4th 2020

For more information contact our Project Manager Evangelin Grace: evangelin@kidsrok.org