Meet Rahel Kiss — an early Internship on Demand participant and the feature of our Student Success Story! Rahel, originally from Budapest, Hungary, lives in London, England as a student at University College London. Rahel participated in just the second pre-internship offering with Internship on Demand in January of 2021.
Rahel joined Internship on Demand as her first internship-related experience looking to boost her resume and build experience working with students outside her major and her background -Rahel was the lone business student (and non-UW-Madison student) in the cohort. Rahel and the other 6 students in our Winter 2021 cohort were tasked with designing a community handwashing station for the developing world. This project, originally inspired by relationships with Kohler Company and their Innovation for Good initiative, was meant to help communities across the globe find a solution to the many health related problems that come along with limited access to proper hand hygiene.
More timely than ever, proper hand hygiene became a focus across the globe as we adapted to the realities of the Covid-19 pandemic. Now the entire global community was braced with the importance of reliable access to clean, safe water. Our teams got to work quickly to create their community handwashing station learning the “language” around the other’s field and figure out how to work together to build their solution following core product design principles taught by companies like Delve and IDEO, who’s work in design thinking inspires much of what we do at Internship on Demand.
Student teams completed customer interviews, research synthesis, prototyping, and design work throughout the 4 week program. Rahel most enjoyed the early aspects of the project where students learned user-centered design basics and were challenged to apply them in the real world. “The step I found most interesting was the workshop where we put together our individual insights and formulated ‘how might we’ questions.” These “How might we” questions were the basis of her team’s handwashing solution. Check out there “How might we’s” and a design her team shared with their IOD mentors at their final design review.
Following her experience Rahel shared her thoughts on the value of Internship on Demand saying, “It was like an internship in the sense that we got to learn the professional theory, process, background behind some things we might do intuitively, for example the way we approach problems etc.”
It has been incredible to see Rahel’s growth since her experience with Internship on Demand. As of June 2022, Rahel is actively pursuing her BASc Arts in Science in Behavioral Science at University College London with a planned graduation in 2023. Rahel is also the Partnerships and Communications Coordinator at Lumi.Network, a platform hosting cohort based global entrepreneurship programming for 10–17 year old based in London, England. On top of school and her work at Lumi, Rahel serves as the Creative Director at UCL Kinesis Magazine, University College London’s only Life Sciences Magazine. That’s an awesome resume right there!
In May 2022, Rahel was invited to join McKinsey & Company’s Next Generation Women Leaders EMEA cohort for May 2022 where she can continue to develop her leadership skills. See details on the program here.
Great work Rahel! Keep it up. We can’t wait to see what comes next.
Connect with Rahel on LinkedIn
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Software development pre-internship programs here →
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