The goal of many college students is to eventually transition into the workforce, whether it be through internships or other positions. However, the opportunity for these internships is much harder to come by for students who are not from the United States. International students are restricted in many areas due to bureaucratic restrictions that underpin the visa approval process during college and postgraduate years. For instance, the Optional Practical Training (OPT) visa, which is commonly held among international students, only permits students who have non-STEM degrees to work in the US for a year, while students who have STEM degrees can apply for the STEM OPT extension for up to another two years. This enforces strict requirements for both the international students and their employers. In addition, because the majority of employers are not willing to sponsor a work visa because of the high application fees (~$6000), extra paperwork, and the time it takes to receive an approval from USCIS (up to 2 years), many international students are not able to find career opportunities during their study in the US.
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is one of the universities with the highest number of international students, with numbers of at least 12,000. However, even with the advantage of the name brand of UCLA, most of the international students continue to face barriers when pursuing career opportunities. This can be very overwhelming to students, creating further psychological distress in addition to any potentially preexisting stress factors, such as the pressure to succeed and financial stress.
Our project sets out to empower the international student community at UCLA. We aim to achieve our goal by creating a map for international students to share their experiences with employment opportunities in the US. We hope that by mapping the stories of international students at UCLA, we can effectively create a safe space to share the experiences of those who face career-related opportunity barriers, as well as alleviate some of their stress regarding their future and their immigration status through solidarity and information.
Our website has the potential for empowering many international students for years to come since the more users we have, the larger the data samples we can collect. We hope that our platform continues to collect real and detailed community stories about internship/employment opportunities from international students explaining their real experiences going through the process. We also hope to receive feedback about our website so that we can improve user satisfaction and reach a wider range of audience.
Since our targeted group is international students at UCLA, we intend to distribute our project to the UCLA Career Center and student-based organizations at UCLA such as alumni associations and International Student Association (ISA) at UCLA which focus on international students, to expand on this project and assist the graduating students both practically and mentally. Besides that, the Global Siblings Program, hosted by UCLA Dashew Center, is an annual event where numerous international students interact with each other, which may be an ideal opportunity to share our site and survey.
Since our site was built on open source tools for accessibility purposes, if this project was to be repurposed or passed off to another organization, it would come at no financial cost. The only requirement is to have a Google account to maintain the Google Form and the Google Sheet. However, we do request that all future projects derived from this one to remain open source and visible to the public.