internships 

The CUNY Dominican Studies Institute seeks to expand the pool of scholars in the field of Dominican Studies and does so by sponsoring doctoral fellows and visiting scholars/students. It also supports undergraduate students through research-focused internships and work-study, part-time employment. The number of such positions varies based on funding availability.

In addition, the Institute's Archives sponsors internships for graduate and undergraduate students interested the field of archiving the history of people of Dominican descent in the United States. For more information about the Archives Internship program, see Archives Internships.

Beginning in summer 2012, the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute is building a partnership with Smith College's Archives Concentration: participation in the CUNY DSI Archives Internship Program will be one of the praxis options available to Smith students who pursue the concentration, alongside opportunities to intern at such prestigious institutions as Smith's own Sophia Smith Collection, the Wistariahurst Museum, Historic Deerfield, Amherst Writers and Artists, the Harvard Art Museums, the Jewish Women's Archives, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture,andthe Margaret Sanger Papers Project.

The Dominican Archives Internship Program is designed to provide interns with hands-on knowledge regarding the survey, accession, processing, arrangement, description, automation, preservation and servicing of archival materials, and use of primary source material for historical research. In addition, the program is supplemented by a mentoring component which includes information related to appropriate workplace conduct, work habits, time management, job performance, and job-readiness skills. Interns work under the supervision of archives professionals and technicians in order to obtain a general knowledge of the nature of the work, working conditions, training requirements, employment opportunities as well as the actual work involved in the archival profession.

The program is administered by the Chief Archivist, Idilio Gracia Peña, a professional archivist with many years of experience in the archival profession. One of his aims is to share his wealth of knowledge acquired in the field with the interns, who he hopes will continue the noble mission of preserving the Dominican people's legacies.


In academic year 2009-10, the Institute formalized an internship agreement with Swarthmore College under which two undergraduate students, funded by the College, spend the summer at the Institute engaged in supervised research projects. The first two Swarthmore interns were:

Stephanie Rodríguez, a history major at Swarthmore College.  Ms. Rodríguez was a Lang Opportunity Scholar (LOS), an internship awarded by the Lang Civic Center at Swarthmore College. The LOS is awarded to six Swarthmore students in their second year in college to initiate a project for social change.  Stephanie Rodríguez worked for 10 weeks at CUNY DSI under the supervision of Ms. Miguelina Rodríguez, a doctoral fellow at the Dominican Studies Institute who came from Rutgers University's Department of Public Policy and Urban Planning to conduct research on housing in New York City among Dominicans.Stephanie Rodríguez assisted with the literature review writing summaries of articles related to housing segregation.  

Ana Rosado, a sociology major at Swarthmore College.  Ms. Rosado was awarded the internship by the Richard Rubin Scholar Mentorship Program and spent six weeks as an intern at CUNY DSI under the direct supervision of Dr. Ramona Hernández who at the time was writing a chapter about the Dominican Family in the United States.  Ms. Rosado assisted Dr. Hernández with literature review, including analyzing data from sources available in the Dominican Republic and the U.S. Dr. Hernandez's chapter will appear in Ethnic Families in America: Patterns and Variations, Edited by Roosevelt Wright and published by Prentice Hall.