I hope this email finds you safe and well during these challenging times. The Center for Career and Professional Development (Career Center) is continuing to fulfill its mission, which includes supporting and empowering our students in their internship and job searches, fostering relationships with employers, and promoting faculty involvement through collaborative relationships.

Due to the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, our students face an even tougher internship and job market. Please know that the Career Center is working diligently to identify virtual/remote internship and job opportunities. They will also continue to work closely with the Class of 2020 through the summer and beyond to assist them with their job searches. 

As we look toward the future, we are pleased to announce that our Career Center was one of four campuses selected for a highly competitive CUNY Career Success on Campus grant. This grant will allow us to hire a full-time Campus Career Specialist who will be responsible for cultivating industry/employer partnerships that increase the number of high-quality paid internships and full-time job opportunities available to our students. As you may know, CUNY has prioritized increasing the number of students in paid internships and having someone dedicated to finding those opportunities is a boon to our students at CSI.  

Since we will soon have a full-time staff member focused on internship opportunities, the grant requires that our campus accurately and completely capture all internship information, paid or unpaid, and irrespective of who provided the opportunity — Career Center staff, campus faculty/staff, or students themselves. CUNY wants to ascertain the total number of CSI students who participate in internships since these experiences have been proven to lead to enhanced job prospects after graduation.

Thus, we are developing a career metrics dashboard that will serve as a campus-wide internship repository. This repository will make it easier for campus stakeholders like you to have access to this information for recruitment materials, Middle States reviews, accreditation, and CUNY reports. Equally as important is the benefit this can provide to our students. We hope that this repository will serve as a resource for faculty, staff, and students alike.

We ask your help in providing information for this repository. Please take a few moments to fill out the survey below, which captures information on internships (paid or unpaid) that you helped a student secure or for those internships in which students received credit through an independent study. We seek this information for academic year 2019-2020.  Please follow this link to complete the survey.

As always, we will send our annual internship/job survey to students as well, but the response rate is only 15% so we appreciate your help in reporting.

Thank you in advance for your assistance. 

By CSI Careers