Rubenstein School a model for university-wide efforts to increase internship options for students

Celeste Heinz is getting a workout.

Pressed against the wooden railing of a bridge on Burlington’s Beltline spanning the Winooski River 25 feet below, she’s hauling up a thick rope dangling a torpedo-like metal cylinder. Once she’s hoisted it over the rail, Heinz opens a door in the cylinder and takes out a large glass bottle full of water.  

Heinz, a senior environmental studies major in UVM’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, has spent her summer collecting water samples like this one from Lake Champlain and its tributaries -- then, under the watchful eye of a supervisor, divvying up the contents in an assortment of smaller containers, meticulously labeling each and shipping off the lot to a state lab for a battery of tests -- as part of a paid internship at the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources.

“It’s been awesome,” she says. “It’s helped me realize I’m definitely on the right path” toward a career in water quality monitoring or watershed education. She’s also made valuable contacts that could help make her career goals a reality.   

Internships hopping

Heinz’s experience this summer is a case in point for why UVM took a perfectly good internship program a few years back and put it on steroids.

“We wanted not just a good program, but a best practices one,” says Pamela Gardner, director of UVM’s Career Center, “because internships are so important from so many perspectives. They increase students’ academic success and commitment, help them explore career ideas and understand fit in a field, build their professional network, help them develop skills -- and, not insignificantly, often get them a job after graduation.” 

Beginning four years ago, the Career Center boosted the number of internships -- carefully researched so they match UVM students’ varied interests -- on its customized jobs database from 490 in 2008 to 1,019 last year. It added new staff, both an internship coordinator and an employer outreach coordinator, and created a new internship website. It beefed up its internship programing, meeting with faculty to help them develop for-credit internships, hosting weekly internship workshops at the Career Center and sponsoring an internship “hop” every October.

Just as important, it played a key role in prompting what Gardner calls a “sweeping cultural change” at the university that sought to integrate academics and career preparation beginning the day students set foot on campus.

What/how

Two elements are central to that sweeping change, one a “what” the other a “how.”

Helping students understand what to do at UVM to up their odds of success after graduation is a planning tool debuting this year called the Four-Year Plan for Career Success. All students, beginning at orientation in the summer, are urged to fill out the plan with their academic advisers. The plan is a year-by-year guide that lays out the steps -- from exploring the connection between majors and careers early in their education to attending alumni networking events later on -- that lead to post-graduate success. Internships figure prominently in the plan in all four years.

Helping them understand the “how” half of the equation is the Career + Experience Hub, a satellite office of the Career Center that opened last fall in a high traffic corridor in UVM’s busy student center, the Davis Center. The Hub is staffed every weekday with experts from eight different UVM offices, all dealing with experiential education -- which employers highly value -- from faculty mentored research to study abroad to service learning to internships. 

“The four-year plan is a great tool, but it doesn’t have value if students don’t implement it,” Gardner says. ‘The Hub is about making that an easy process.”

Perennial opportunities

While UVM was beefing up it internship program centrally in the Career Center, a parallel process was unfolding around the university. 

The College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences has developed and staffed its own internship program directly connected to its academic focus. The School of Business Administration ramped up its internship program and has committed to place every student in at least one internship. The university created a new, interdisciplinary internship program in food systems, with its own coordinator, housed in UVM Extension. And a growing number of departments in the College of Arts & Sciences offer internship classes that combine coursework with an internship experience.

The inspiration for many of these academic units was the Rubenstein School, which has run a successful internship program with its own internship coordinator since the mid-1990s. Three years ago, the school decided to do its own version of going from good to great. 

Over the years, the school had placed hundreds of students in internships, says Anna Smiles-Becker, Rubenstein’s internship coordinator for the past four years, “but we wanted to add to our program by creating a group of dedicated, high quality internships” on the level of the national internships Rubenstein students competed for every year. To do that, Smiles-Becker and several faculty and staff colleagues reached out to a group of environmental organizations, agencies and companies in and out of Vermont with a deal: reserve a 12-week paid internship position for a UVM student every summer, guarantee that the work will be engaging and inspiring, commit to supervising and training the student, and the Rubenstein School would prepare and support the student during the internship and pay half its cost.

The Perennial Summer Internship program was born. In 2012, its pilot year, the program had three internships. Thanks to good word of mouth -- among both students and employers -- the program now offers 24 in organizations ranging from the Hurricane Island Center for Science and Leadership in Maine to VHB, an national environmental consulting firm with an office in North Ferrisburg, Vt. The Rubenstein School’s new dean, Nancy Mathews, sees great promise in the program and hopes to expand it in the future.       

Gardner is nothing but happy to know students like Celeste Heinz, whose work with the Agency of Natural Resources is part of the Perennial Internship program, are having success.

"We all need to be working on this,” she says. “Our goal is to have everyone pulling in the same direction.”

That direction is a good one, helping ensure that having a successful career after graduation is a trademark of a UVM education.

PUBLISHED

09-03-2014
Jeffrey R. Wakefield