During college, students these days essentially have two options — to either focus solely on passing courses for a degree or make the most of the time before entering the “real world” by snatching up as much job experience as possible.
As the U.S. job market becomes more demanding of potential employees, more students at MSU are looking to set themselves apart from other students by completing unique internships and undergraduate work experience.
Internships have slowly become commonplace over the last decade for undergraduate students in a myriad of majors. A report by MSU’s Collegiate Employment Research Institute, or CERI, found that 92 percent of employers in 2014-2015 offer students pre-professional experience.
“Employers seem to be wrapping everything around the internship, and in most cases thats the vehicle that employers will look for,” Director of MSU’s Collegiate Employment Research Institute Phil Gardner said. “If you don’t have experience employers are not going to talk to you.”
Required experience
Depending on the college, some students are required to participate in an internship in order to complete their degree. Journalism majors are required by the university to take at least a one-credit journalism internship before graduation.
“News organizations nowadays really don’t hire anybody that hasn’t had an internship, they want to make sure the person has the right news instincts and can generate great story ideas,” journalism professor Bonnie Bucqueroux said.
The School of Hospitality Business requires each student participate in two internships in the hospitality industry before graduation and The James Madison College also requires fieldwork experience before graduation.
Students in other majors might simply see the value of gathering internship experience before they graduate. At MSU, 80 percent of packaging majors will graduate with an internship in that field although they are not required to have one.
Although not every department requires internship courses to graduate, employers expect a minimum amount of pre-professional experience before graduation, dependent on a student’s major.
A report from MSU’s CERI in 2013 showed that potential employees with law and nursing degrees are expected to have the most pre-professional experience before they enter the workforce. For law, a person is expected to have between 16 and 18 months of experience and those going into nursing are expected to have between 12 and 14 months.
Students in accounting and business specialty fields — which include finance, marketing and human resources — are expected by employers to have gained a full year of experience prior to graduation.
For most other academic disciplines, employers expected 10 to 12 months of experience according to the report. General business, engineering and humanities and languages were expected to obtain the least amount of professional practice, with a requirement of eight to 10 months of experience.
A step ahead
For those heading into the journalism field, internships allow students to step into a professional setting where they see how the news is made and gain hands-on experience, which they couldn’t otherwise, Bucqueroux said.
Journalism and international relations sophomore Ian Wendrow is interning at WDET Detroit. He said that his time there has given him a specific skill set.
“Bouncing off ideas with professionals and being in that atmosphere teaches me how to develop story ideas, and also gives me access to networking with other journalists, as well as high-powered officials,” said Wendrow, who drives to Detroit two times a week for his internship.
Because undergraduate work experience is required for a degree in the James Madison College, social relations and policy freshman Gerena Walker interns for the Ingham County Treasurer’s Foreclosure Prevention Office. Walker works directly to help people avoid foreclosure.
“This isn’t exactly what I want to be doing, but it involves public affairs and helping people so it’s great experience,” Walker said. “I’m also working directly under the Ingham Country treasurer Eric Schertzing, so I’m expanding my professional network.”
Despite not having a requirement by her college to get professional experience, neuroscience sophomore Nicci Russell has been getting experience as an undergraduate research assistant in the Neuroimaging of Attention and Perception Lab. She said that the experience she is receiving through her research time cannot be replicated through classwork.
“Learning MATLAB and using the MRI in our lab definitely helps build my experience, and I’m analyzing results for someone who is publishing a report about this — it’s a bigger weight on my shoulders than getting a grade,” Russell said.
She added that learning to use high-powered and complex equipment in a real-world situation is just one of the many advantages students can gain by working in a lab before graduation.
Marketing junior Jon Wallace is a marketing intern for the Michigan State University Federal Credit Union. He manages the website and social media for MSUFCU’s financial 4.0 program and works to promote the organization to students.
“It’s given me a lot of experience in the field of marketing that I wouldn’t be able to get in the classroom,” Wallace said. “I’ve been exposed to a whole new side of marketing.”
From the employer’s perspective
Students seek internships to gain invaluable experience in their field of work, earn academic credit and sometimes even earn money, but organizations seek to hire interns for different reasons.
According to MSU’s Collegiate Employment Research Institute’s recruiting trends report from 2012-13, 57 percent of companies hired interns in order to identify unique talent and develop student’s skills who could be hired in the future, while 23 percent hired interns for supplemental staffing and special projects.
“Employers are trying to identify potential employees as soon as possible, and internships give them that ability,” Gardner said.
Employers are currently hiring interns at a higher rate as well. Findings from a 2014-2015 recruiting trends report from CERI shows that more than 53,000 intern and co-op positions will be available this year, with an average of 25 positions per company, and more than 60 percent of employers will offer internships. Seventy-one percent will pay interns as opposed to last year when only 67 percent did.
“A lot of organizations have not hired consistently over the last 15 years because of the recession, so they’re facing a need to hire, and new technologies are requiring younger staff to take advantage of them,” Gardner said.
Employers are also relying more on the number of experiences a potential employee has had in pre-professional work. The 2013 CERI report, showed that 34 percent of companies consider one internship experience sufficient, while 55 percent desired employees to have two internship experiences in order to be hired.
The college labor market is as strong as ever though and companies are readily hiring new graduates who have participated in pre-professional experience. CERI found that employers are currently hiring new graduates at levels not seen since the “dot-com frenzy of 1999-2000.”
“It really has changed in the last decade and your peers are facing a very different situation than students who graduated up to the 1990s,” Gardner said. “Since 2006, we’ve seen the internship essentially take the place of first jobs.”
