SAIS Bologna students' summer plans

In the past 24 hours I have tapped 16 SAIS Bologna students on the shoulder and asked them what they will be doing this summer.

It amounts to a random survey that depends on the students' goodwill. Perhaps the timing -- at the outset of final exams -- could have been better. But in a mere two weeks this year's students will have graduated and moved on from Bologna to tackle new challenges and make room for next year's class.

You can hear the students discuss their summer plans in the video below. Despite the small sample of students, the destinations and internships reflect their diversity and range of interests.

Many of the jobs were lined up with the help of SAIS Bologna's Career Services Office. These 16 -- a small minority of this year's class -- will be working in:

• Ethiopia at a school for orphaned girls
• Ghana at an investment bank
• New York at Greece's mission to the U.N.
• Washington at the U.S. Treasury Department, a biotech firm and a conflict-management group
• Johannesburg and Rome at the World Food Programme
• Cote d'Ivoire at a peace-building NGO
• Brussels at the Belgian Foreign Ministry and at Carnegie Europe
• Germany at an electrical utility
• Chile at a small-cap equity investment firm
• Paris at the OECD

Facing what she suspects will be her last free summer for a while, Sofya Nazmetdinova will be returning home to Uzbekistan. "I'm going to have fun," she says.

If you are reading this by email, you can see the video here.

To see what last year's class did in the summer of 2011, click here.

Nelson Graves