Week One: Starting Remotely and Meeting New People

Hello! My name is Cianna Phelan, and I will be interning with International IDEA this summer, located in Stockholm, Sweden. While I haven’t made it to Stockholm just yet, I’ve already officially started working remotely for my first week.

International IDEA (The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance) is an intergovernmental organization that supports sustainable democracy worldwide. They are currently celebrating their 30th anniversary, and with the festivities taking place at their headquarters, there wasn’t quite enough room for interns to be on-site just yet. So, for this first week, we’ve been working remotely and diving into reading materials focused on the history of electoral systems and looking in the future at how artificial intelligence (AI) may shape democratic governance, including electoral systems and democracy building, in the future.

This week also gave me the chance to get connected with the other interns! While we’re all scattered across different time zones for now, we’ve already started chatting and getting to know each other through group messages, which has made the start of this experience a lot more exciting and extremely helpful. I cannot wait to meet them in person in the coming weeks.

Next week, I’ll finally be arriving in Sweden! I’ll be staying in a neighborhood called Solna, which is about 20 minutes outside the city center. This will also be my first time regularly taking the metro or subway ever, so I’m both mildly nervous and weirdly excited about figuring that out. I’ve already been researching Stockholm’s transit system, and I’m hoping I don’t get too lost on my first day.

I am looking forward to sharing more once I’m settled in and working in-person at the office!