International Internships

When I met a commercial real estate agent earlier this year, I had no idea at the time the difference that informal conversation would have on my career. I’ve since joined in an internship program and hope to work in commercial real estate myself. It all started when I met Dale Beede, a broker with Coldwell Banker Commercial Prime Properties in Grand Junction. My father, Jesus Gutierrez, needed a commercial agent to lease vacant space in his building. Mr. Beede came to the building to meet with my father, and I was lucky enough to be present. We chatted for a several minutes as Mr. Beede collected the information necessary to list the building. The very next day he came back with signs to put up, and I was fortunate enough to be present. I start talking to Mr. Beede about several different topics, including commercial real estate. He asked me a question: “Have you ever thought about being a commercial real estate agent?” I told him at the time I hadn’t. He replied, “Well, if you ever d...

Luke Gibson is investing in his future by starting his own painting business. Gibson, a graduate of Cabarrus-Kannapolis Early College High School and freshman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is participating in an internship through Young Entrepreneurs Across America which allows him to start his own business through Student Painters. “It sounded like a good opportunity that I couldn’t pass up,” Gibson said. “It is a good opportunity for me to learn all aspects of running a business.” After hearing about the program in one of his classes, Gibson went through an application process and was selected as a branch manager for the Concord and Kannapolis area. He plans to spend his spring and summer marketing the business and providing a quality painting service to his customers. “This internship hires select people and trains them to run their own business,” Gibson said. “I’m going to start the business this spring.” Student Painters has a mission to give a new and uni...

Adviser Carina Diamond says her firm has hired more than half of its interns for full-time roles Carina Diamond is managing director at SS&G Wealth Management in Akron, Ohio. Voices are an occasional feature of edited excerpts in which wealth managers address issues of interest to the advisory community. At my practice, we have made a point of taking on at least one intern at any given time. I find that most firms don’t use interns and if they do, it isn’t in a structured or purposeful manner. Yet it’s important to bring on young talent to ensure the quality, diversity and longevity of your practice. Through an involved program and training, we have been able to hire more than half of our interns to full-time roles. Some advisers hesitate to hire interns because they’re simply unsure how to source or screen them. You should be able to find strong candidates at any local university with finance major. Build contacts at these schools so you can stay in the loop on upcoming career fai...

College graduates need an international perspective to be competitive in today's job market. Many will have to negotiate foreign cultures whether they work in the United States or abroad. As part of this continuing change, International College Internships should now be viewed as steppingstones to career success. Even though relatively few American students go on internships abroad, the number increased 133 percent from the 2003-4 to the 2008-9 academic years, according to the latest figures from the Institute of International Education, which looked at students who received credit for such programs. Several trends have fueled the growth in international internships over the past decade. For one thing, more students and graduates are pursuing opportunities in Asia, given the weak economy in the United States. In addition, international internships are increasingly becoming integrated with college service-learning programs. Student interns now work abroad in hospitals, orphanages, c...

Having a business degree doesn’t seem to help much when landing a job, but a relevant internship does. That’s according to a new study led by researchers at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, and published in January in the journal Labor Economics. The researchers sent about 9,400 fictitious resumes to business-related positions in finance, insurance, management, marketing and sales. The “applicants” had graduated four years before applying for the job and each had a randomly selected major, including accounting, biology, English, economics and finance. A quarter of the fictitious applicants held three-month summer internships five years earlier in relevant positions, such as working as a financial analyst or on a marketing team. The research team found no evidence that finance, marketing or management degrees improved job prospects for any of the applicants. However, working in relevant internships—as far back as five years earlier—boosted employment prospects significantly, incr...

Is there no one thing that contributes to a successful college experience? About a year ago in an article about student motivation, I referenced a book by Daniel Chambliss and Christopher Takucs,How College Works, which actually boiled down the successful college experience to one key element: someone needs to spark a student’s motivation. That could be a professor, another student, and alumnae, someone, anyone. The crux to college is to meet as many people as possible to find that spark. Advice even included forget about the topic of a class, go for the professor. If a star is teaching Introduction to Geology, then learn about rocks. The same type of searching applies to internships as well. Most of the time it is unclear what type of internship one wants, with what type of people, in what kind of organization, and doing what type of jobs. After all, life isn’t some neatly laid out sit-com in which one action leads cleanly and logically to the next; rather, it’s usually a conglomerat...

One of the most popular computer games of all time, the 25-year-old Windows Solitaire, was written by an intern named Wes Cherry who was never paid for it, or given royalties of any kind. The history of Solitaire has been one of the stories that surfaces now and then. It came to light on Monday when someone on Reddit posted a "where is he now" update on Cherry, noting that these days he's into apples - and not the technology kind, but the kind you eat. He owns Dragons Head Cider, an apple orchard and apple cider producer on an island west of Seattle. The post went crazy on reddit and temporarily crashed the Dragons Head website. Someone sent Cherry a Facebook message telling him his website had been slammed by Reddit and so he jumped on the thread and wound up telling the Windows Solitaire story again including Microsoft's internal company "Bogus Software": I wrote it for Windows 2.1 in my own time while an intern at Microsoft during the summer of 1988. I ha...

More and more Chinese enterprises are choosing India as a destination for investment, as the country is becoming more open to foreign capital. In a keynote speech at the China-India Business Forum in Shanghai, made during his visit to China in May, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed his welcome towards foreign investment to his country. "We do believe that foreign direct investment is important and it will not come in the country without a globally competitive business environment. Therefore, we have rationalized a number of issues which were bothering the investors. Now India is ready for business. You must be sensing the winds of change in India." Since then, a number of Chinese entrepreneurs including Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, as well as Wang Jianlin, chairman of Wanda Group, have all visited India to investigate the possibilities for future investment. Figures show that business visas for Chinese enterprises visiting India have increased by over 30 percent d...