Occupational Health Internship Program

Applications for Summer 2014 Now Available! Application Deadline March 14, 2014!

Paid Summer Internship Opportunity! June 16 – August 15, 2014

See OHIP’s 10-year anniversary VIDEO.

ORGANIZATION

The Occupational Health Internship Program (OHIP) is a national summer internship dedicated to helping students learn about the field of occupational safety and health (OSH) from those most at stake: working people.

Since 2004, OHIP has played a crucial role in training, mentoring, and inspiring a new generation of OSH professionals, as well as providing worker organizations and unions with resources to strengthen their health and safety efforts to prevent job injury and illness.

OHIP is housed within the Association of Occupational and Environmental Clinics (AOEC) and has training sites in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego, Chicago, Boston, New York City, Denver, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

DESCRIPTION

OHIP interns have played a vital role in some of the most exciting worker health and safety movements across the country. Teams of two students are placed with a union or worker organization to work on a project to investigate job-related health and safety problems among workers, often of new immigrant groups, employed in an under-served or a high hazard job.

Projects are designed to maximize contact between workers and interns. Through this process, interns gain a better understanding of the complexity of the work environment from the workers’ perspective. At the same time, it empowers workers and strengthens their investigative and technical skills. As a relationship of trust is built between interns and workers, both gain a better understanding of the underlying political and economic forces that create job conditions.

At the end of the project, teams provide a “give back” product to the workers and their “host” union or worker organization, present their summer project at a NIOSH national videoconference, and produce a final report.

QUALIFICATIONS

Graduate and undergraduate students can apply; some stipends are restricted to US citizens. Non-US citizens must supply documentation of permission to work in the US. Undergraduates must have completed two years, preferably in a field related to public health, environmental studies or public policy. Graduate students in public health, medicine, nursing or a related field are encouraged to apply. See Eligibility.

OHIP seeks students with experience or interest in working with unions or social justice organizations, are organized and self-starting, have good team skills and ideally speak a second language of new immigrant workers: Spanish, Tagalog, Vietnamese, etc. We encourage students from minority and recent immigrant groups to apply.

COMPENSATION

Undergraduate students receive a $4,000 stipend and graduate students receive a $5,200 stipend. See General Questions.

TO APPLY

See How To Apply and Application Process.

For application questions, email OHIP Administrative Coordinator Ingrid Denis at idenis@aoec.org or call 888-347-2632. For general information on sites or potential projects, email National OHIP Coordinator, Sarah Jacobs at sjacobs@irle.ucla.edu.