Report of Dare to Explore Traineeship

By Alex Bimbo Onatunji

My name is Alex Bimbo Onatunji, a Nigerian student studying the International Erasmus Mundus Master Programme in Mediterranean Forestry and Natural Resources Management (MEDfOR) at the University of Lleida, Spain, and the University of Padova, Italy.

A month after I was appointed the Northern Africa Regional Representative of the International Forestry Students’ Association (IFSA) in 2018, I came across a news item on the IFSA website: a joint EFI-IFSA-IUFRO Global student networking and green jobs in the forest sector was starting. That was the starting point of my interest in the project.

Not long after, I discovered the Dare to Explore Traineeship adverts from the IFSA website and applied for the 2020 and 2021 open calls. I was successful at my second trial in 2021 and was selected for the “DTE_02 Planning of the International Forest Policy Meeting (IFPM4) 2022”. I was full of joy when I received the email that I had been selected.

My internship began in January 2022 as I started working with both Joint EFI-IFSA-IUFRO and NewGo projects in EFI Bonn. I contributed to data analysis and prepared reports such as students’ perspectives on forest-related education and career, global interviews conducted on forest-related employers, and donors’ reports. I also helped plan the end of the project webinar and wrote two blogs published by EFI and IFSA for the end of the project webinar in the Joint EFI-IFSA-IUFRO project. In the NewGo project, I analyze interviews about the EU taxonomy and the sustainable finance platform, work with MAXQDA for the first time, and then co-organize the young researcher’s competition for the International Forest Policy Meeting (IFPM4) 2022.

This traineeship is crucial to my capacity development as it has built the gap between the theoretical knowledge I learned in the university and the practical world of work. The traineeship also gave me a lifetime opportunity to network with several researchers at the European Forest Institute, sharing my experience and learning from others through various meetings. This opportunity also gives me the chance to develop further my multi-tasking ability, communication, and teamwork skills. The project has also further inspired me in forest education, which I have been working on for at least five years.

The traineeship has taught me to manage my time better and sustain my motivation, and the experiences I got will also influence my Master’s degree thesis. I am very confident that my experience at the European Forest Institute, Bonn Office will contribute in not a small measure to my future career prospects.

I want to use this medium to thank the organizer of the traineeship, the excellent researchers I collaborated with, and the project funder.