It might shine like gold but it's quite the opposite
Pros
Here you will be able to get in touch with several NGOs from all over the world and get to meet some great and passionate people. Co-workers can be really nice and you can make some good connections. The mission itself is not bad at all and the objective of the organization is noble. Working hours are also good and they allow you to do things outside your work.
Cons
As I wrote in the title, it might look like gold (especially from Glassdoor's reviews) but it's really not. In fact, while staying at the organization the management invites the interns and the employees to leave reviews on different platforms and then tell them when they got posted. This, in my opinion is a very unprofessional thing to do. In addition to that the majority of the reviews are left by interns who work at UG for a very short period of time and they mainly came from internships related to English courses attended while in SF. However this is only a small incipit. ORGANIZATION STRUCTURE: The organization is extremely poorly run and it completely lacks a middle management. Below the CEO and 2 managers close to her in hierarchy, there are few junior paid employees who do all the job. These junior employees are basically in charge of a huge number of interns (could be more than 20) who actually arrive there and with little or no guidance (manuals....so many manuals for everything) are supposed to do a job that might not even fit their skills. This is another point, at UG it doesn't matter if your background is marketing since you might end up doing the Executive Assistant (Pamela's secretary) where your job is fill the CEO's calendar with her events, or fill some unbelievable tasks as printing cooking receipts (yes, it happened to me) or order some CEO's private tasks. To make summarize this: you have some junior guys who should be learning, who are in charge of managing a vast number of resources without training or help from the management. This leads to a great level of confusion and frustration both for the interns and for the junior employees. MICROMANAGEMENT: The lack of middle management also brings to a "need" (?) of micromanaging each resource. Everyday you are supposed to send an "End of the Day Report" where you explain hour by hour what you did that day. This is simply absurd. Shouldn't it be the job of your manager to tell if you have been effective or not? It should, but since your manager doesn't know you must fill an EOD. Ah...I hope you like Gchat a lot...you can be sitting next to a person and when you talk to him/her to ask for something your should expect a look like "why are you bothering me??? Use Gchat!!!! ...I've never seen such a thing in my whole life. TURNOVER: It is also worth to be mentioned that the interns turnover is absurd. You have people coming in and out basically every 2 weeks. Interns who come only few hours, interns who come only for 2 weeks (basically just the time to read the manuals and leave). Also the number of interns is ridiculous compared to the number of hired staff. Seriously: how do you think you can run a company only with interns? TASKS: You know when they say that too much multitasking can be confusing (and let's remember that you work with little or no guidance)? Well...at UG they might not have heard the lesson. Here they ask you to be X% on marketing, X% on Executive Assistant and X% in something else. All of these areas are not even coherent with each other, which could be understandable since managing different projects can be nice, as long. In reality they ask you to do something completely unrelated and super confusing. So you should be able to switch your brain from point A to R randomly throughout the day...and remember to record everything on your EOD. OVERALL CONCLUSION: I believe that this organization is a CEO's toy. She likes the idea of going to conferences and panels as a speaker (yes, one of the tasks is also finding places where she can speak at) and play the role of the super entrepreneur but the real substance behind it is close to nothing. There is little or no organization. If you are an English student for the Summer in SF you might fit. You spend few hours here and there, make some connections and get maybe a first time experience. If you are looking for a career path, for a junior position to start your working life, I would not go here, look somewhere else....very very far from here. If you don't trust my judgment, ask yourself a question: how comes that an organization that is supposed to be so cool and has been around for several years, is still so small? Take a look other NGOs that have been around for almost the same amount of time and see where they are (like Kiva for example).
