Two years after USAID’s Community Support Program (CSP) launched its collaboration with USAID’s University Scholarship Program (USP) to provide students from the American University of Beirut (AUB) and the Lebanese American University (LAU) with internship opportunities, CSP expanded its internship program in April 2022 to include hundreds of undergraduates and fresh graduates from nine additional Lebanese universities partnered with USAID under its Higher Education Capacity Development Program (HECD). Accordingly, by November 2022, CSP had placed 108 students and recent graduates in internships across all USAID-funded programs in Lebanon, allowing them to enrich their professional and soft skills, and enhance their employability, while providing them with much-needed financial support during the worsening economic crisis. On November 4, 2022, CSP conducted its first interns’ feedback session, attended by 33 interns from all eleven partner universities, to enable interns to express potential concerns and recommendations so that CSP may address any challenges raised and implement appropriate fixes.
“The feedback session allowed me to network with fellow interns, as well as share ideas I had for the program’s improvement which could benefit other students,” stated Thierry Daoud, senior mechanical engineering student at Notre Dame University (NDU) who is currently supporting the design and construction engineering team at DAI on USAID’s Water Sanitation and Conservation (WSC) project.