Dare to Explore! – Traineeship Program
The Dare to Explore! Traineeship Program is an integral part of the EFI-IFSA-IUFRO Capacity Development Project, which offers four specified, 3-months traineeship opportunities each year for 2019, 2020, and 2021. The trainee positions are intended to familiarize students of forest(ry) programmes with work at the science-policy-interface at the international level, including research, communication, and policy-relevant activities.
2021 – Coming soon!
2020 – Closed
The 2020 open call has closed.
Thank you for all your great applications!
All applicants will be informed about the decisions for our four traineeships at EFI, IUFRO and CIFOR-ICRAF in the coming weeks.
Traineeships will take place in early 2021.




See below the open call 2020 including outlies of the traineeships:
Frequently asked questions (FAQ)
You do not need to be a member!
Being a member of an IFSA local committee will be counted as a small asset in the application. I.e. in the last call we had 2 candidates that where member and 2 that weren’t being the successful applicants. So, it is no hinderance if you are not a member.
However, it might still be interesting to you to learn more about IFSA, since it is an amazing Organization connecting students of forestry and forest-related courses from all over the globe. IFSA offers many exciting opportunities like excursions and participation in big forest conferences.
Please see the Open call for a list of all Universities meeting the criteria.
For the current open call the timing of traineeships is not very flexible. However an adjustment of a few weeks is always possible.
We will have another round of traineeships open in spring 2021, then the timeline will be more flexible between June-December 2021.
DTE_02 with IUFRO is a remote traineeship.
For the other traineeships we still hope them to take place on site. To give you the full experience.
However, with the current COVID situation it is very possible that all traineeships will need to take place remotely.
The decision for remote vs. physical traineeship will be done on a case-to-case basis; considering the situation in Germany and in the home country of the successful applicants.
2019
In 2019 our DTE! trainees were:
Sophie from the United States on “Guiding Principles to Rights Based Approaches” at GLF in Bonn, Germany
Rodrigo from Brazil on “Science-Policy Interlinkages for the XXV IUFRO World Congress 2019” at IUFRO Headquarter in Vienna Austria.
Damiano from Italy on “Workshop organisation on forest education, employment and green jobs in the forest sector” at EFI in Bonn, Germany
Fredy from Peru on “Conceptualizing rewilding for forests” at EFI in Bonn, Germany
Please see below the open call 2019 including outlines of the traineeships.
Meet our Dare to Explore! trainees and learn about other Intern- and Traineeships IFSA has supported:
Meet the Dare to Explore! trainees – Ajdin
Who are you? Hello, my name is Ajdin Starčević and I come from the hills of South Eastern Europe, more precisely the land of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I am currently enrolled in the European [...]
My Youth in Landscapes Intern Experience – Poonam Ghimire
My 6 months of internship as a ‘Youth in Landscapes Network Intern’ at Global Landscapes Forum was a very valuable experience. I got to directly engage with the communication, outreach and engagement team and [...]
Dare to Explore! Traineeship experience report – Rodrigo
Caros amigos do IFSA, I am Rodrigo, a Brazilian student doing the master’s program in European Forestry at the University of Eastern Finland (Finland) and Transilvania University of Brasov (Romania). At the end of October, [...]
Meet the Dare to Explore! trainees – Fredy
Meet Fredy, our final trainee for the year 2019. He has just started his traineeship on the rewilding of forests at the EFI office in Bonn. Can you give us a short introduction about [...]
Meet the Dare to Explore! trainees – Damiano
Here it is the interview to the third trainee, Damiano, who has just started his traineeship at the EFI Bonn office. Who are you? Ciao a tutti! My name is Damiano and I am from [...]
Meet the Dare to Explore! trainees – Rodrigo
Time to introduce our second Dare to Explore! trainee. We interviewed Rodrigo who has started his traineeship with IUFRO in Vienna earlier this month. Who are you?Olá, tudo bem? My name is Rodrigo, I am Brazilian [...]