Director of Cooperative Education Internship Program, Western Connecticut State University

I'm Anthony Ciarleglio, Director of the Cooperative Education Internship Program at Western Connecticut State University. Well, we work directly with students and with employers to come up with meaningful experiences for students. The purpose of the internship program here at Western is for students to gain experience related to their studies or to their career plans. Among the employers we work with, many will use the internship program to recruit a potential full-time employee. So it's really, from my point of view, it's really been a risk-free try-out, in many cases, for the students, but also a way for the employers to test the student on and see if they would be a fit upon graduation. Typically, dependent upon the economy, depending upon the student on the outcome of the experience, 40 to 50% of the internships will lead to full-time employment. So in terms of leveraging a student's degree for maximum employment, it's a tremendous mechanism. We do a lot of outreach with employers. We meet with employers. We speak with them on the phone on a regular basis. We're emailing employers. We engage employers in a lot of our events here at the university that come out of the Career Success Center. For example, we have upcoming an annual career fair. We'll have 80 to 90 employers by invitation only. They're employers that we work with on a regular basis, and they will often offer students summer jobs and internships at this event, which is a 4 1/2 hour event. We've been regular members of the Connecticut Cooperative Education and Internship Association. We're members of the National Cooperative Education and Internship Association, ongoing members of NACE, the National Association of Colleges and Employers. So we're engaged with employers in a number of different ways. We try to attend many community events. We try to get out of the office as much as we can. We're somewhat limited because our professional staff is only three people, so we're often spread fairly thin. But, you know, we feel that our efforts result in jobs and internships and employment for the students.