Jessica Alatorre ’07 Spends Field Work Term at Human Rights Watch, New York, NY

Ask Bennington alumni to recount their most remarkable tales from their college years, and you're likely to hear yarns about outrageously imaginative faculty and fellow students; ingenious and unlikely social events; the "aha" moments that shaped their own work and lives.

But you'll also hear tales from across the country and across the globe--set in political campaigns and research laboratories, law offices and art museums, hospitals and theaters, newspapers and national parks. That's because, for each year they attend the College, Bennington students must go out into the world to complete seven-week winter internships in areas that fascinate them and complement their studies.

Field Work Term, going strong since the College's founding, brings new stories each year. Here's one such tale from FWT 2007. Stay tuned for the final installment of our series next week.

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Fifteen minutes with Jessica Alatorre ’07 is all it takes. Between her discussion of the campaign to ban cluster bombs, her plan for creating a standing army for the United Nations, and her interest in international torture law, you come away convinced of at least one thing: This young woman is going to change the world.

And because she speaks so matter-of-factly about it, you get the sense that you might be able to do the same.

Jessica’s concentration at Bennington is international studies, with an emphasis on human rights. The idea to spend her senior year Field Work Term at Human Rights Watch actually came from one of her teachers and close mentors, former Iranian U.N. diplomat Mansour Farhang, who teaches diplomatic history and international relations at Bennington—and also serves on the board of Human Rights Watch. He encouraged her to submit a resume. With her experience working as the editor of one of Bennington’s student newspapers, Jessica decided to pursue an internship in HRW’s Communications department, combining journalism and human rights work.

"I've never had a job where I had to be so independent and assertive."

“I’ve never had a job where I had to be so independent and assertive,” she says. “It entailed a little bit of everything involving the media—seeing which of our issues were getting picked up, which journalists were covering the stories that we do. I put my Spanish to use; I did some translation, and I ended up calling the presidents’ offices of different countries in Central America.” She also transcribed documents for HRW’s campaign against cluster munitions.

Getting newspapers to report on Human Rights Watch’s issues can sometimes be a challenge, Jessica says, but on the other hand, “sometimes things just fall into place. For example, we’ve been working on the cluster munitions campaign for a while, but it just so happens that Senators Leahy [D-Vt.] and Feinstein [D-Calif.] recently introduced a bill to make the U.S. government stop selling cluster munitions, and also pushing for a ban on them. And when those things fall into place, and politics is coming into play with human rights work, that’s when you really make a splash. Then reporters come out and they’re the ones hounding Human Rights Watch for more information.”

"Field researchers...make sure the world knows what's going on, to put pressure on governments to change their practices."

Jessica’s seven weeks at the organization gave her both a crash course in how nonprofits run and a better idea of what kind of career she’d like to pursue. Among the biggest surprises, she said, was learning that such a large organization is run by so few people—“every person was doing the job of three.” But another surprise was discovering that although she enjoyed her work in communications, she was even more deeply drawn to research.

“A field researcher,” she says, “is deployed for anywhere from 3 to 10 months of the year, and sent to a location where they are responsible for following up on the abuses in that region. In some cases, they are the only journalists who are there officially. So they’re in the field talking to all levels of society, including the government—both to work with them and to make sure the world knows what’s going on, to put pressure on them to change their practices.

“Right at the beginning of my Field Work Term, all the field researchers came back, and I was talking to one person who had been working on the Darfur issue. He was describing how sometimes he would be in Darfur, but how frustrating it was that most of the time he could only be in Khartoum, because it was so dangerous. Talking with him really made me want to do that sort of work.”

More:

• Profiles in Adventure 2007: Ryan Smith '08 Spends FWT as a Medical Intern at a Hospital in Guadalajara, Mexico
• Profiles in Adventure 2007: Lydia Brassard '08 Spends FWT at the Ronald McDonald House in Pasadena, CA
• A Field Work Term sampler
• The Democracy Project and recent Democracy Project classes
• Social Sciences at Bennington