STEM students and employers around the country say internships have implications that reach well beyond summer income and experience. Students value internships as an opportunity to confirm or refine their choice of majors as well as an essential element in their long-term strategy for launching post-graduation careers.
Career Communications Group, the publisher of Hispanic Engineer magazine, has spoken to several college students who have landed paid summer internships, developing real-world solutions for real-world problems. To help you get ready for Internship season, here are a few role models with tips and advice.
During her internship at Occidental Petroleum, Michelle Lopez helped create an electronic detection system that actively warns truck drivers when low clearance bridges are ahead. As part of her responsibility, the Oklahoma State University sophomore got to put her electrical engineering major to work.
“It was a real-world problem to work on,” said Lopez, who decided along the way that chemical engineering with a petroleum minor is a better academic fit.
Gabrielle did a summer internship at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard as a process improvement engineer and saw a payoff spending her summers interning.
For Phine Ulysse, the on-the-job experience helped to advance his progress in classes when he returned to school. He graduated in May 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering. While in school, he interned during the summer. His internships entailed inspections of bridges and culverts, completing inspection reports, and helping with the reinforcement bars for one of Baltimore’s water facilities.
Tyler, who did one of her first summer internships at the Google campus in Mountain View, Calif., said clarity was one of the benefits of working on the tech support team.
“It helped reassure I enjoy technology. They also gave me something to reach for and push myself academically.”
At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Florida A&M University software engineering master’s student Crystal worked on developing a system to protect special nuclear material and classified information.
“Although I knew C# programming language, I was also exposed to more methods and functions in that environment.”
Angela spent 11 weeks in South Korea. The engineering major worked on the construction of elementary and high schools on a military base. She said she didn’t realize until the end of her internship that the camp was preparing to become the largest United States garrison in Asia.
“It’s cool to know that I am a part of history in the making.”
Bria finished up one summer at Exxon Mobil Environment Service with a trip to Indonesia before starting her junior year in the fall. Bria, other interns, and companies say there is a strategy for landing an internship.
“I applied for the internship in September,” said Justin. He completed his second summer internship—a paid internship— at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems in St. Augustine, Florida.
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