The Center for Career and Professional Development (CCPD) 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 CCPD is working diligently to identify virtual/remote internship and job opportunities. We will also continue to work closely with the classes of 2020 and 2021 through the summer and beyond to assist them with their job searches. 

The Career Success on Campus grant (CSoC) has allowed us to hire a full-time Campus Career Specialist who has joined the CCPD staff in cultivating industry/employer partnerships that increase the number of high-quality paid internship 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 CSI would benefit in capturing all internship placements, paid or unpaid, irrespective of who provided the opportunity — CCPD 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 have developed 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 online survey, 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 and Spring 2021. 

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 in this campus-wide initiative. It does indeed take a village.

By Caryl Watkins