President Calvin Coolidge once said, “the chief business of the American people is business.” Indeed, to many, America is the land of entrepreneurs. Plenty has changed since 1925, but entrepreneurship remains popular today. College-age students especially are drawn to join or found startups, having seen the successes of companies such as Facebook and Instagram. Brown students have the intelligence and drive to become successful entrepreneurs. But unfortunately, the University does not support much of a program in business education.
We have ENGN 0090: “Management of Industrial and Nonprofit Organizations,” the Brown Entrepreneurship Program and student business groups. But classes don’t teach the nuts and bolts of business. We don’t have courses on marketing, operations or corporate law. To remedy the gap in offered classes, the University should update the Open Curriculum to include a form of applied business education. In addition to allowing academic departments to offer credit for internships, Brown should have departments give students the option of having internships that are undetaken during a semester influence what kind of degree students ultimately receive.
Individual departments could establish relationships with businesses, negotiating positions for student interns. Students could then find internships tied to a concentration in an academic department.
In the Brown spirit of choice, each academic department could make the decision of whether to offer credit for internships, how much credit and what type of internship could count for credit.
Semester internships give students real-world experience that can’t be found in a classroom. And paying $42,808 in tuition while facing a 7.3 percent unemployment rate makes practical business education all the more important to future graduates. Classroom education is without a doubt essential to a degree. But to many, the marginal benefit of an extra class or two might be less than the benefit of a relevant internship.
To integrate internships with coursework at Brown, students could make presentations or submit reports about their internship work during the semester. This academic side of the internship would be a new form of interdisciplinary learning.
The nature of the job market limits my proposal. Organizations may not make as many internships available as students would like, and it may be difficult to find internships related to particular fields of study. But the program doesn’t have to work for everyone to benefit some.
In fact, a small version of this already exists at Brown. The applied math-computer science concentration has an optional “professional track.” Students who complete industry work related to applied math or computer science and write a report about it are eligible to add the “professional track” designation to their diploma. The internship program would be a way of offering the “professional track” to more students across different concentrations for work during a semester.
The work experience and practical skills learned from a semester internship give students an edge in the job market. In a series of 100 interviews of Generation Y adults, a career advisor writing for Fox News found that the “hallmark of someone who had found career success after graduation from college turned out to be early internships” — and not simply summer internships, but rather, “sustained experience throughout the year.”
Semester business internships also offer an opportunity to improve advising at Brown. Many students think advising needs improvement. In addition to a form of career advising, the internship program would provide concentration advising, giving students a better sense of what to study. Indeed, the study of 100 Generation Y adults found that internships influenced students’ course selection in college.
Many will question the need for this program, especially if students can already complete internships during the summer. But the need for internships keeps increasing. The working world today is perhaps less certain than it has ever been. According to Future Workplace, an executive development firm, 91 percent of millennials — those born between 1977 and 1997 — expect to stay at one job for fewer than three years. That means millennials will have between 15 and 20 jobs during their working lives.
The skills demanded in the workplace are also rapidly changing. With the explosion in the availability of data and the increasing ease of communication, employees will have to adapt to changing technology.
Such an internship program would offer an opportunity to keep the Open Curriculum alive. To continue, the Open Curriculum has to stay current with advances in the world. Otherwise, students and faculty members will begin to wonder if imposing requirements might be better than allowing choice of outdated material. The Open Curriculum can last only as long as students believe that the course offerings are worthwhile.
Keeping the Open Curriculum alive and well means continually experimenting with new courses. That way, through trial and error, the Open Curriculum will evolve to suit the times. Semester internships for concentration credit would build students’ practical skills, improve advising and support our unique curriculum.
Oliver Hudson ’14 may be contacted at oliver_hudson@brown.edu.
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