She toured campuses, scoured catalogs, and buttonholed everyone from alumni to students in her intended field. The Grinnell internships are designed to help students build confidence, self-knowledge, and street smarts, says career development director Steve Langerud. Grinnell has a host of alumni willing to supervise interns in television and film. We're going to help you plan not just the next four years of your life but the next 20. These new internships are designed to help students focus their professional interests or to be springboards to careers.
Close monitoring is another key ingredient.
All three institutions assign each intern a faculty adviser who stays in touch either by phone or by E-mail. Site visits by school officials underscore with employers the importance placed on the program. And all require a final academic project. For the publishing internship she put together through Grinnell's career center last year, Colter kept a journal documenting her summer writing captions and organizing photo sessions at a monthly magazine in New York. She also wrote an essay about what she learned.