Campus internEXP helps students build skills, make impacts through internships

Early mornings on a university campus are usually quiet and peaceful. Shrewd students plan their schedules to avoid early morning classes, and the unfortunate ones with 8 a.m. courses usually arrive in a semi-comatose state. Faculty and staff members usually enjoy a cup of coffee before easing into the workday.

But those overseeing the Campus internEXP program find their offices a hub of activity at pretty much any given hour.

The Campus internEXP program at Virginia Tech represents a part of the university’s goal to create additional experiential learning opportunities for students and one continually gaining in popularity. Specifically, Campus internEXP focuses on providing on-campus internships for students seeking to gain applicable experience in potential career fields while working toward their degrees.

Launched in fall 2021, Campus internEXP kicked off with 18 students in intern positions throughout campus. This past fall, 83 students worked as interns.

The program makes sense from many different perspectives, according to Becca Scott, director of professional development and experiential initiatives within the Office of Career and Professional Development and one of the founders of Campus internEXP. Most notably, the university is the largest employer in Southwest Virginia.

“We’ve got a lot of professionals who work on this campus, and they represent all different kinds of career fields,” Scott said. “So we asked ourselves how we could better leverage the connections between them and the students whom we know want to work on campus and students who are looking for internship opportunities. We understood that we could provide a framework for some best practices around everything involved with a student’s internship.

“We also knew from our work in Career and Professional Development that a lot of our students in engineering and business and some technical fields seem to have an easier time finding opportunities. We thought this was a great space to try to expand and diversify opportunities that we knew some of our students were struggling to find.”

In  summer  2021, Virginia Tech officials hired Julia Ward to oversee the Campus internEXP program. She not only helps students navigate the application process of securing an on-campus internship, but also works with supervisors on how to write specific job descriptions, provides tips for interviewing applicants and communicating with interns throughout the internship, and offers ideas for onboarding students and setting expectations.

On-campus internships are open to all students starting the second semester of their freshmen years. Students interested first need to attend an information session about the program.

“They get to learn what Campus internEXP is, what the benefits of participating are, and they also get informed that they’re enrolled in a zero-credit asynchronous course while they’re in their experience,” Ward said. “They get the details of the program, but they also get resources and information on what makes a good resumé, what makes a good cover letter, and some best practices for in-person and virtual interviewing. It’s information sharing about the program, but also a little bit of prep work to hopefully create students who are well informed and able to be awesome applicants.”

How to apply for on-campus internships

Students apply for internships through Handshake, a career platform that helps students find jobs, co-ops, and internships and one used by numerous schools. Internships through Campus internEXP usually open the semester before the position starts. For example, positions for the spring semester usually open in mid-October.

“All our positions are required to be open to all majors,” Ward said. “A supervisor, for example, is welcome to put human development as a preferred qualification if they would prefer a human development student, but we don’t allow them to require a certain major, and that’s just because we know that a major doesn’t equal a career. Students may be using our program to explore careers that they’re interested in. We want them to have that opportunity.”

In addition to gaining experience, students also get paid. Most interns work between 10 and 20 hours per week – no more than 20 – and make $12 per hour, which is the minimum wage in Virginia.

An internship length through Campus internEXP varies but lasts no longer than a year. The reasoning behind this is simple.

“We want to have as many students as possible take advantage of those opportunities,” Scott said. “If there’s an internship on campus that a student really wants and that person gets in that internship and stays for three years, then other students never get that opportunity.”

Future of Campus internEXP

Both Scott and Ward expect to see continued growth for Campus internEXP. Ward said that 49 intern job postings for this past fall semester generated nearly 400 applicants, and that from spring 2023 through spring 2024, 100 percent of students participating in the program either agreed or somewhat agreed in an exit survey that they would recommend the program to other students.

“I think that says a lot,” Ward said. “I think word of mouth and just students saying that they had a good experience goes a long way.”

Planning for future growth will require additional resources, including additional internships, supervisors, and staffing to help train supervisors and assist students.

But the need for internship opportunities is great. Many experts estimate that approximately 15-20 percent of college students haven’t held a job before, and universities thus are bulking up their career services staffing and budget.

Fortunately for Virginia Tech students, the commitment is there to do the same.

“Their campus job, whether it’s a job or an internship, is likely their first employment experience, or one of their first,” Scott said. “So, setting those students up to be successful is important to us, along with laying that foundation of what’s expected of you as a professional.

“Our program has gotten a lot of support from the university. The support from supervisors saying, ‘We want to hire students,’ to upper-level administration saying, ‘Oh, this is a way to address experiential learning at Virginia Tech,’ has been exciting. That is helping us grow at scale.”

Atudents and faculty members interested in learning more about Campus internEXP should email CampusinternEXP@vt.edu or call 540-231-6241. More information can be found online.