-: I'm Anthony Ciarleglio,
Director of the Cooperative Education Internship Program
at Western Connecticut State University.
Well, we work directly with students and with employers
to come up with meaningful experiences for students.
The purpose of the internship program here at Western
is for students to gain experience
related to their studies or to their career plans.
Among the employers we work with,
many will use the internship program
to recruit a potential full-time employee.
So it's really, from my point of view,
it's really been a risk-free try-out,
in many cases, for the students,
but also a way for the employers
to test the student on and see if they would
be a fit upon graduation.
Typically, dependent upon the economy,
depending upon the student on the outcome of the experience,
40 to 50% of the internships will lead
to full-time employment.
So in terms of leveraging a student's degree
for maximum employment, it's a tremendous mechanism.
We do a lot of outreach with employers.
We meet with employers.
We speak with them on the phone on a regular basis.
We're emailing employers.
We engage employers in a lot
of our events here at the university
that come out of the Career Success Center.
For example, we have upcoming an annual career fair.
We'll have 80 to 90 employers by invitation only.
They're employers that we work with on a regular basis,
and they will often offer students summer jobs
and internships at this event,
which is a 4 1/2 hour event.
We've been regular members
of the Connecticut Cooperative Education
and Internship Association.
We're members of the National Cooperative Education
and Internship Association,
ongoing members of NACE, the National Association
of Colleges and Employers.
So we're engaged with employers
in a number of different ways.
We try to attend many community events.
We try to get out of the office as much as we can.
We're somewhat limited because our professional staff
is only three people,
so we're often spread fairly thin.
But, you know, we feel that our efforts
result in jobs and internships
and employment for the students.