Last April we received Heidi Maria, a Finnish Master student of Intercultural Teacher Education that decided to learn more about our country as well as she develops useful skills for her future. The student did an internship at CIFAL, where she helped them to develop training programs and wrote a book about STEM education, a curriculum based on the idea of educating students in four specific disciplines — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — in an interdisciplinary and applied approach. That book will be given to all the STEM teachers of Paraná.

CIFAL, The International Training Centre for Local Actors for Latin America, based in Curitiba since 2003, is an initiative of the Decentralized Cooperation Programme of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research – UNITAR. 

We interviewed Heidi to know more about the experience she had interning here in Brazil. Check it out:

BE: What were the main tasks at your internship?

We do a lot of different things here. Some days I just work like doing the budget excel or the excel for the planning. It is like the schedule for the year, with all the tasks that we have. Or then, I go to the school, the Colégio SESI, which is like an international high school and I observe the stem education, so it is like science, engineering, math and technology education and then based on the observations and research, I do a handbook of 30 pages of what is applied science of SESI in Finland and then in the end of this training it will be given to all the teachers of STEM education in the Paraná State.

BE:  Did you enjoy your internship here?

I loved it! I loved it a lot, a lot! I really loved it here, like I have my Brazilian friends, and I love my coworkers…

Which aspects of your internship will you share back home?

I think that SESI school has a lot of innovative methods, that’s what I’m gonna talk about when I go back to Finland, I’m gonna talk about SESI, I’m gonna talk about the perfect city, I’m gonna talk about the special methods they use in SESI, I really like that and then the mixed groups and then many things. I really like the group working method as well.

We also interviewed Grace Chiara Schmidt and Priscila da Paz Vieira from CIFAL, to know how was the experience of receiving Heidi at their company and luckily we received a positive answers from them:

BE: How was the experience of having Heidi in the team?

It was awesome, Heidi has helped us a lot in many different activities. We developed a program through a partnership with SESI school, that will show a relation between Heidi’s education with our business. The goal of it was to create a program where she could bring her own experiences and at the same time, learn how we work here.

Heidi has helped us with many other things as well. Things such as our everyday tasks at CIFAL, like the organization of our events, structuring projects that were developed and needed to be sent to UNITAR and SESI Paraná.

BE: Do you think it is rewarding to have a foreigner intern in the team?  

Without a doubt, I think that is very rewarding to have exchange students working here, because with them, we can re-think about our intern processes, we can learn with them and naturally. It is beneficial for both parts.

Check her interview in video on our youtube channel