Doing Internship

Students are encouraged to do internship within the program. You can do either a five or ten weeks’ internship in Sweden or elsewhere. You arrange with this yourself and you may get some financial aid from for instance the Erasmus+ program.

Alexander Maxia’s Erasmus+ internship within the Master’s programme in Cultural Anthropology

I started doing anthropology as a blogger when I first went to Uppsala as an Erasmus exchange student. My idea was to write and share with people my impressions of Sweden comparing them to the two countries I’ve previously lived in: Italy and England.

When I returned to Uppsala for my masters in Cultural Anthropology I was naturally attracted to public anthropology and for me there is no better way to engage a broader audience beyond academia than with making videos. After expressing this interest of mine to my program director he recommended me to contact the ‘Visual Cultural Studies’ department in the university of Tromsø as they are world leaders in the field of making anthropological documentaries. After contacting them I then applied to the International office for an Erasmus+ internship scholarship so that I could work on projects within the department and by doing that learn how to take and edit videos. A few months later I was on the plane heading to Lapland to start my exchange.

Over the following months, I conducted filming exercises using the university’s equipment, learned editing techniques, and worked on putting together a documentary with my supervisor using material he had previously filmed in the field. Meeting people from around Europe and discovering a new place and culture, together with the learning experience I gained, made this a choice I would strongly recommend to anyone with similar interests.

Text and photo: Alexander Maxia