Spring Break
Student interns for peace
Yazmin Ramos
Issue date: 11/2/09 Section: News
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The internship is through the AmeriCorps Peace Corps Fellows program, a program that has commonly drawn Peace Corps volunteers to pursue a master's degree at Western Illinois University.
"I came to Western Illinois University because of the Peace Corps Fellows Program in community development," Wade said.
"I wanted to pursue community development work, and the program at Western seemed to be, out of all the graduate schools I pursued, the best. It offered the best choices in what I wanted to do, plus I really wanted to pursue a master's degree in RPTA, so the coupling of the two really sealed the deal for me."
Wade is a native of Louisville, Ky., and as a teen, she began participating in neighborhood clean-up days and also volunteered at a hospital in Louisville. She continued this practice through her undergraduate years at the University of Kentucky in Louisville, when she graduated with a degree in dietetics in 1998.
"I worked as a dietician before in the health care field, and that's initially what I did in the Peace Corps," Wade said.
From 2004 to 2006 she served in the Peace Corps in Suriname, a small country just north of Brazil in South America. She worked at a new health care clinic in a small rural town. Wade witnessed the importance of the new clinic and watched as it became a major development for the area. Jobs were provided for the residents, more people began to travel to the area in search of better health care and all the while, an interest in community development sparked within Wade. ? ?
The Illinois Institute of Rural Affairs sponsored the Peace Corps Fellows Program in community development on Western's campus. The Fellows Program is designed for people who have completed at least two years of Peace Corps service and are looking to return to the United States to pursue a master's degree.
"The program identifies the internship for me. My program director identifies possible internships for everyone in the program. This internship that I'm doing (in Carthage) is unique to the Peace Corps Fellows Program at WIU with the IIRA," Wade said. "The way that it is set up is year one you take all of your required classes and you have a graduate assistantship. Year two you get to do an 11-month internship and that 11-month internship is technically an AmeriCorps position." ? ?
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