Name: Nayanthi Peiris

Year: 2018

Major: Economics

What’s happening? We’d love to hear how your internship is going!

I am currently completing an internship at the Permanent Mission of Sri Lanka to the United Nations in New York. I’m one of four interns and we were all assigned a Diplomat at the beginning of our respective internships. My Diplomat assigns me various tasks everyday in line with the needs of the Mission and also in line with my interests. As the Sri Lankan Mission is very small in comparison to other missions, there are a good number of meetings at the UN headquarters everyday that the Minister Counsellors are unable to attend. In such cases, they assign interns to attend meetings and write meeting reports.

I just concluded a 1.5 week long conference held in the UN Headquarters which I had to attend everyday as my supervisor was unable to attend it due to other commitments. As part of the conference I had the opportunity to hear from an activist who was formerly a teen radicalized by a large terrorist organization, a lady who lost her husband to gun violence, and other inspiring individuals. The internship so far has been a great opportunity for me to explore various aspects of public policy, diplomacy, and the functioning of the UN as a whole.

I have now spent one month living in New York, and three weeks at my internship. Starting this summer with almost a naive expectation of what it would be like to live in and experience NYC, I can safely say that as of now the city has not let me down. Prior to this experience I had only visited New York for a couple days at a time, and having lived in Sri Lanka prior to starting college at Bryn Mawr, my impressions of New York were mainly borne out of *exaggerated* representations of the city from movies and TV shows. I am so very excited to complete the remainder of my internship, gain a deeper understanding of the UN, and explore more of New York!