By Nicole Troy

Last summer, third year student Nico Julia had the internship experience of a lifetime at the French Embassy in Serbia.  

Drawing on knowledge from his three majors — political science (with a focus on global politics), environmental geography and Spanish — and two minors in French and statistics, Julia positioned himself as uniquely qualified to support François-Xavier Kowandy, the scientific and university attaché for the French Embassy in Serbia. 

Julia spent the summer abroad working on several projects for Kowandy ranging from website development to promoting a sustainability contest to networking with international scientists and researchers on behalf of the French government. 

We sat down with Julia to learn more about how he created a personalized internship experience and what he learned along the way. 

Last summer you had the ultimate global Learn by Doing experience. How did you hear about this internship and why did you apply? 

There was no application process for this internship. I saw some of the projects Mr. Kowandy was working on for the embassy in the Balkans and I liked that they were fostering international collaboration through environmental projects. This was a good intersection of what I study at Cal Poly, so I cold emailed him about it, to which he answered, “I do not take interns.”  

Of course, I was not going to give up. I emailed him back saying I would make a website for his projects. This was enticing because it costs a lot of money for the French government to make a good website within the means of the bureaucracy that they operate in; so, he jumped on the opportunity to get a website done quicker and cheaper by a single person. 

How did your responsibilities evolve over the course of the summer?

I began with creating the website and finished that project within two weeks. Then, I moved onto some new projects that were more in line with political and environmental topics. My boss and my main project was developing an environmental contest in Serbia,