Derian Summer Internship: Faculty-Mentored, Community-Engaged Scholarship

Derian interns support faculty doing community-engaged scholarship in collaboration with locally, nationally, or internationally-located community partners. 

The Derian Summer Internship program facilitates the growth of students as community-engaged scholars. In addition to working directly with Derian faculty mentors and community partners, interns participate in regular ProCES programming designed to scaffold their summer experience through community-engaged scholarship methods workshops and reflective practice. Over the course of the eight-week, 35 hour-per-week internship, students develop an electronic portfolio documenting their experiences, identifying the skills and capacities they are building, and articulating a strategic narrative of their work and learning. 

Projects have included: language reclamation and revitalization; documentary filmmaking; community-building; sustainable agriculture; archival research; archive development; public humanities; curriculum development; generating policy briefs; grant writing; oral history; community history; digital humanities; environmental impact studies; community mapping projects.

Eligibility: Freshmen, Sophomores, Juniors who are enrolled in the Spring semester prior to the internship and the Fall semester following the internship. Students who are taking leave from the University the semester prior to or following an internship are not eligible for Derian internships. All students must be in good academic standing.

The Derian Student Internship fund is named in honor of Patricia "Patt" Derian, a human rights activist and a U.S. State Department official in President Carter's administration.

Funding

ProCES provides students with a weekly living stipend which covers housing and meals, as well as weekly supplemental funding. Additional funds for project-related expenses are available on an application basis.  

Stipends may be subject to tax and may be reported by the University to the Internal Revenue Service. See University guidelines 

Summer 2025 Derian projects will be posted in November.

Contact Tania Boster [email protected] to receive a notification when opportunities and applications are live.


students and community partners gathered for a photo at a farm project site

Photo Credit Justin Zhang '24

Excerpts from Derian Interns' Project Portfolios

"I am a rising junior in computer science, with prospective minors in linguistics and history. I am greatly interested in applications that lie at the nexus of these fields, which led me to the Lenape Language Project. Using the knowledge I have accrued in studying computer science and linguistics, I spent the summer exploring and developing resources for the furthering of the Munsee (Lenape) language, with the end purpose of developing an online dictionary that can be used for pedagogical and language reclamation purposes. I attended the Language Camp and met with language keepers to discuss the most appropriate and effective ways to create the online dictionary.  To reach the point where I am now with respect to the project, I worked closely with professors and community members and consulted the pre-existing literature on the language as primarily documented in the places of Muncey and Moraviantown. Through this project and my research, I gained a deeper knowledge of language revitalization as it interfaces with the needs of local communities, with representatives from multiple Lenape nations in attendance for the camp."

"I am a rising senior (’24) in the Astrophysical Sciences department at Princeton University. While my university work focuses on research questions in the physical sciences, I have a strong interest in history and the humanities. What excites me most about this summer's Museumverse project is the potential to use new technologies to tell human stories. Among other lessons, my research this summer impressed upon me the richness of oral histories, and so the importance of seeking them out, preserving them, and sharing them with future generations."

"The skills acquired during this internship will undoubtedly shape my future pursuits at Princeton and beyond. I plan to continue engaging in community-based research projects and careers that prioritize shared goals and values between institutions and the people they serve. I will leverage the trust-building and communication skills I honed during this experience to collaborate effectively with diverse communities. Additionally, I aspire to promote accessible results and community empowerment through my research, contributing to positive change in society."

"This Internship furthered my Interest In how location can affect many facets of people's lives and especially people of color. For my thesis I want to focus on generational mobility of minorities after they move to places of opportunity. I think my [internship project] played a role In furthering my Interest.  It demonstrated how places that once held promise and economic stability could slip Into extreme poverty."

"The Ujamaa-EFN database is a community seed-saving project recording the inventory of cultural and experimental seeds owned by our community partners. The ArcGIS mapping project is meant to track the spread of seeds over time across zip codes. My involvement with the ArcGIS project is hopefully just beginning, as I believe there is still work to be done with it....[T]hrough conversations with different community partners, I've been thinking more about the applications of computer vision and machine learning in agriculture. Computer vision models could optimize different aspects of the growing process, especially with irrigation for example."