Students use Campus internEXP to their advantage

During the early part of 2024, Janae Neely spent a significant amount of her spare time searching and applying for paid internships. Like most students, she sought opportunities to learn more about her potential future career field – multimedia journalism – with a desire to gain valuable experience in that field and meet people who likely could help her in the future.

But Neely, who graduates from Virginia Tech in May, kept running into dead ends.

“I was trying to apply to a lot of paid internships that I could do remotely from school, so a lot of them were working for Fox News or other news organizations and things like that,” Neely said. “I either just never heard back or it just kind of came and went nowhere. There were a couple that were on campus, but I just didn’t know if I would be able to handle those with my schoolwork.”

A random perusal of Handshake, a career service platform that connects students and graduates with employers, led Neely to an on-campus internship with a Virginia Tech history professor conducting research about Smithfield Plantation.

The paid internship was through Campus internEXP, a universitywide initiative that represents a part of the university’s goal to create additional experiential learning opportunities for students — among the goals of Virginia Tech Advantage — 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.

An opportunity to conduct interviews, edit audio and video clips, and upload those clips to YouTube offered the perfect experience for a student aspiring to get in the journalism industry. That the internship included a focus on African American history provided a bonus for Neely.

“I didn’t even know that the Campus internEXP program existed, and when I found the internship through Handshake, and I was like, ‘This would be perfect because it’s part time and I think it will just be a perfect balance of work and school,’” Neely said.

“I didn’t know much about Smithfield Plantation and its history, and me, I’m a huge history buff. … So this was something that I thought was cool, and it was something I kind of gravitated toward.”

Neely applied for and earned the internship and this past fall worked with Jason Higgins, humanities digital scholarship coordinator for Virginia Tech Publishing in University Libraries. She documented and archived history related to the families at Smithfield. She will continue the internship throughout the spring semester.

Campus internEXP, housed within Virginia Tech’s Office of Career and Professional Development, has provided Neely  and dozens of other students with internship opportunities. Virginia Tech officials plan to expand the program going forward, furthering the university’s commitment to experiential learning.

Students who have participated or are participating in internships through Campus internEXP share what they’re doing and how it is preparing them for the future.

Janae Neely

• About: Senior from Centreville, Virginia
• Major: multimedia journalism
• Internship: Digital humanities intern for the Descendant Communities Reconciliation Project

What do you do?

I’m working with Dr. Jason Higgins in the history department on an oral history project called the Descendant Communities Reconciliation Project. We currently interview descendants of the Fraction family that were enslaved at Smithfield Plantation and Solitude. We also interview descendants of the Preston family, who were the enslavers, and we talk about the legacy of enslavement, especially here at Virginia Tech. I do a lot of the editing and online work. I will transcribe the interviews that have been recorded. I do a lot of video and audio editing, and I will make clips for the interesting parts of the interview. I upload them to YouTube, so that’s a big bulk of my job.

Why did you apply for this internship?

It’s always been interesting to me, Smithfield Plantation being on the Virginia Tech campus, and I feel like, for me, the school hasn’t talked about it a whole lot. I didn’t know much about it and its history, and I’m a huge history buff. That’s just something I like to do in my free time, studying and learning about African American history as well, so this was something that I thought was cool, and it fed into my own interests as well.

How has it helped you?

I think what’s helped me the most with this job is the creativity of it. I’m allowed a lot of creative freedom, which is great. Dr. Higgins basically trusts me to pick out whatever I think is important or whatever stands out with these interviews, and it’s great being able to take something from the beginning pages of these interviews and turn it into something of my own vision.

Future goals?

I’m still open to everything. I would love obviously, as a journalism major, to work for a news organization and do stories for them, and that’s where this job comes in handy because I’m writing about new people all the time. I’m editing footage and audio all the time, which I would be doing for my real job. But hopefully being a journalist or an editor for some sort of news organization is where I’d like to end up.

Cassie Freedlander

• About: Junior from McLean, Virginia
• Major: Mechanical engineering
• Internship: UAS (uncrewed aircraft system) flight operations and engineering Intern

What do you do?

My internship is with the Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership, which is based in the CRC [Corporate Research Center] at Virginia Tech, and what I’ve been working on is basically drone testing and analysis of different drone companies to get them, depending on what each client wants, certified by the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] to fly their drones in certain circumstances. Some of the things that I’ve worked on are hardware building a drone and software and programming. The software piece is getting drones to do certain things, so mainly what I’ve been doing is working with simulations.

Why did you apply for this internship?

I knew about the Campus internEXP program. Most of the internship openings were not necessarily related to my major. They were more maybe like pure software, and I don’t want to just do software. I had been keeping an eye on those internships, and then over the summer, I got a notification about this position and it looked interesting. I’ve worked with drones before, not at this scale but I was familiar with them. I applied because it looked interesting, and I got accepted.

How has it helped you?

I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do, just something maybe aviation related, but not full aerospace engineering. When I saw this opportunity, I felt like it would be a good chance to just explore something different without committing to it long term. Once you have a full-time job, usually you want to stay there for a couple years, so I thought this would be an interesting way to learn about this field. For me, it’s been a really great experience.

Future goals?

Having this internship has been helpful because I like it a lot, and I think I want to do something along the same lines. There are a lot of different drone-related companies. Not all are startups or small companies, but there are also bigger ones, and as they’re becoming more widespread, there are a lot of opportunities to work in that field. … I guess my dream job would be something like what I’m doing now, but more focusing on the design and testing of the drones.

David Minder

• About: Senior from Medford, New Jersey
• Major: Business information technology (BIT) with a concentration in operations and supply chain management
• Internship: Internship support program management intern

What do you do?

I work in the Career and Professional Development Division with students. I used a lot of my technical skills that I learned in BIT throughout my time at school and other internships to drive insights for them. I look at different student data that they’ve had in the past regarding what internships students got, what jobs students got, different pay amounts, stuff like that. I was charged with going over that and driving some actionable insights. Also, Virginia Tech just received a grant from the state allowing students who had unpaid internships to receive funding for them participating in those internships. So I was involved in creating a process that helps allocate that grant money from start to finish.

Why did you apply for this internship?

The biggest thing for me, as a senior, was I wanted to give back to the community. I take career and professional development seriously. I’m coming from out of state to Virginia Tech, so I’ve been serious about making a career and making the best of the opportunities I had. So giving back and being able to work with students in the career and professional development space was something that interested me, along with sharpening my skills and doing the stuff I do in my everyday academics.

How has it helped you?

A lot of the internship is very structured. They give you a lot of feedback. They use different professional competencies, such as your teamwork skills, your digital fluency skills, and all that has allowed me to identify areas where I might need to improve, or where I’m excelling. That will help me in my career. Based on the feedback from my supervisor and the experiences I’ve had, that has helped me grow as a professional.

Future goals?

I’m going to work at Ernst and Young in Philadelphia after I graduate. I’m doing technology consulting within their consulting practice.