Trevecca faculty encourage and prepare students while applying for internships

By Cara Craton

Staff Writer

When Ethan Surrey, a recent Trevecca alum, began interning with Harvest Hands Community Development during his junior year, he never dreamed it would land him a full-time job just months later.

“It’s had a great impact on my life because I have recently been married and just paying for school and student loans. Having a job that is livable income has been really cool… I don’t know if the same opportunities would have existed if I wasn’t here,” said Surrey.

Spring semester is a time when many students start thinking about internships. Seven majors at Trevecca require one or more student internships as part of the curriculum including Business, Communication Studies, Education, Exercise Science, Nursing, Religion, and Social Work.

Jamie Casler, the director of the JV Morsch Center for Social Justice, requires his students to take part in two internship experiences: one in the junior year called the pre-internship, which consists of 60 hours of internship experience, and one in the senior year, which consists of 165 hours of internship experience.

“That’s what I really hope when our students are in the pre-internship or the senior internship is that they are actually applying what they’ve learned in the classroom and they’re gaining valuable work-related skills and then they are more confident when they go into the workforce,” said Casler.

Internships are meant to provide students with practical hands-on experience. Casler has seen the impact that these internship experiences have had not only on his students’ development and experience but also on the community.

For students, internships can be good for networking, gaining hands-on experience and building a resume for a job after graduation, but finding the perfect internship can be difficult.

John Radziminowski, a career coach and employment specialist at Trevecca, said the university provides several resources to help students connect with organizations that might provide a productive internship experience for them.

First, he recommends creating and updating a LinkedIn profile.

“It [LinkedIn] is just a living, breathing resume… it will recommend people for your circle… [and] jobs can be posted there. It’s a good thing to start to build out, especially since it’s probably a little bit familiar for students who are constantly on social media,” said Radziminowski.

He also recommends Skills First, a platform some students might remember from LINK class, to build a resume. Skills First offers AI features to help improve the language and format of a resume. One of those features helps make resumes more applicable to the job description. Students can copy and paste the job description, along with their resume, into the AI helper, and it will provide them with feedback and suggestions to make the resume more applicable and eye-catching.

The last two resources for internship hunting Radziminowskil recommends are treveccaconnect.com and Handshake. Trevecca Connect is a website launched by Trevecca that is still in the beta testing phase but provides a LinkedIn-like platform specifically for TNU students and alumni. Updates about TNU life, relating to current students and alumni, are also posted there.

Handshake is an app specifically geared toward young adults in or recently out of college.

Students can sign in with TNU credentials and use it for job or internship hunting.

Surrey encourages students to take risks and remember an internship is a learning experience.

“Just having the expectation that if you make mistakes, that’s the whole point of the internship: to learn and grow and be taught. So to have the mindset of, I’m not going into this to be great. I’m going into this to be taught and learn,” he said.