Skidmore Student Wins Prestigious DAAD Internship with German Parliament

If you are an environmental studies major with a minor in German, what could be better than spending two months working with the Green Party as an intern in the German parliament?

Not much, according to Christina Hanley '06, who has been selected for the highly competitive Émigré Memorial German Internship Program of the German Academic Exchange Service, Deutscher Akademischer Austauch Dienst (DAAD). The program supports students from the U.S. and Canada in two-month internships with the German Bundestag, where they work in member offices and learn firsthand about the parliament's legislative and administrative procedures.

Hanley, who also has a minor in business, is particularly interested in the areas of sustainable development, resource management, and environmental law, so she chose and was accepted for placement with the Green Party ( die Grünen), which is well established in the German government. "Germany is a world leader environmentally," says Hanley. "It's very proactive, very big on recycling and emission controls, and on city planning for public transportation." The Green Party, she adds, "is very influential in policy making."

While she hopes to devote most of her time to "shadowing" one or two members of parliament, Hanley will also spend time with each of the political parties represented in the Bundestag. The internship award will cover living expenses for the two months, and she has elected to go in September and October, at the beginning of a new session of parliament.

The DAAD award is "an extraordinary accomplishment," said Mary-Elizabeth O'Brien, director of Skidmore's International Affairs Program and Hanley's advisor and German-language teacher, adding that her student is "uniquely talented and dedicated."

Those talents include fluency in German, a necessity for the internship. Hanley has spoken the language since she was 12, when her family lived for a year in Heidelberg, Germany. She has been a German peer tutor at Skidmore as well as a business coach and athletic trainer, and this semester she interned with the Saratoga PLAN land-trust organization, doing a fiscal analysis of the county's green infrastructure plan.

As a major in Skidmore's interdisciplinary Environmental Studies Program, Hanley has been able to combine course work in economics, environmental law, and business sustainability. As a senior capstone project, she has teamed up with two other students to study potential threats to recreational uses of Saratoga Lake. Last spring, she spent a semester n Australia doing a field study on environmental sustainability and financial viability of businesses such as tourism, logging, hydroelectric power, and farming.

Hanley, a native of Baltimore, is the daughter of Skidmore alumna Christine Wright Hanley, Class of 1976. She is set to graduate at the College's 95th Commencement Exercises on May 20.