At Elizabethtown College, students are required to complete two signature learning experiences (SLEs) to fulfill their graduation requirements. The Department of Business, alone, boasts a whopping 50 internship opportunities between the summer 2015 and spring 2016.
Though students across all majors can find internships related to their career choices, the number of completed programs in business has been significantly high.
“There’s a bunch of different little pieces [that go into it],” said Sylvester Williams, associate professor of business law at E-town. “You have to have good relationships with business companies.”
Williams heads the Hershey co-op program in which students complete real work and learn about business to achieve their goals. “It’s not just busy work,” he said. The students become immersed six months in the business.
Business is really a discipline where you need to do the work to understand the work.”
Not only do the students complete the internship opportunities to fulfill their SLE requirements, he said, but also to gain an understanding of where they can direct their energies in the working world.
Business administration major Kelsey Detweiler said in an email interview that she acquired valuable skills during her internship at The Hershey Company co-op – “public speaking, networking, meeting deadlines, and I became more confident in myself.
“[Internships] give you real-world experience. You can only learn so much in the classroom, so having the opportunity to apply that knowledge to real situations is invaluable.”
“The professors have good relationships with the companies we were able to work with,” said business administration student Nicholas Lorenz. “I think [the department] gives us a lot of opportunities and knowledge superior to colleges elsewhere
Internships, Williams noted, are a tangible way for students to put what they learn in the classroom to good use and demonstrate the power within a department.
“Business is really a discipline where you need to do the work to understand the work,” he said about the department’s program. Finding something where a student can demonstrate their abilities are important to finding their career path and making them more marketable.