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Sunday, June 22, 2003

Journalism student Stefanie Schmiel is pumped up about working at dbaza inc., a small Oakland company that makes educational products for children with diabetes and other chronic health problems.

	Steve Mellon/Post-Gazette
	Stefanie Chmiel, 22, is an intern at a small firm in Oakland called dbaza, inc., where she is writing marketing materials and updating the company's web site. She was connected to the firm through a regional clearing house that connects businesses in southwestern Pennsylvania with college students.

The graduating Indiana University of Pennsylvania senior is writing and editing press releases and marketing materials, and updating dbaza's Web site. The 22-year-old has frequent opportunities to interact with Sergey Sirotinin, the company's president and chief executive officer.

"It's quite a challenge. There are so many things I'm getting to do,'' she said. "It's great."

The company is pleased not only with Schmiel but the way it met her through the new Regional Internship Center of Southwestern Pennsylvania. The foundation-supported program helps employers develop internships and connect with a potential pool of about 100,000 students who attend the region's 33 colleges and universities.

The center is a partnership of the Three Rivers Workforce Investment Board, a business-led panel that oversees local employment and training programs, and the Coro Center for Civic Leadership, a nonprofit that trains young adults for civic and corporate leadership positions.

It evolved from discussions among various business and community organizations and foundations about how to better attract and keep young talent in a region that has lots of college students but an overall aging population.

The basic idea is that students who have a positive experience with an industry or company through an internship will be more inclined to stay once they graduate and start a full-time job search.

"It's a win for a company to do this. It's a good thing for the region and we think it can be a substantial benefit for a student," said Ron Painter, TRWIB's executive director.

The work force investment board had an intern of its own look at local intern programs. The study concluded that small business believes it too time-consuming to find the right students and to figure out how to properly use them.

So the decision was made to help employers locate students and to set up the right process to make an internship valuable for both employer and student, something Coro has experience in doing.

The service is free to both students and employers, thanks to support from the Heinz Endowments and the Richard King Mellon Foundation. It serves employers in 13 southwestern Pennsylvania counties and the West Virginia panhandle.

The center, which began last July, so far has helped develop 550 internships, said its director, McCrae Martino. By midsummer, the center expects to open an interactive Web site that will serve as an electronic clearinghouse for employers and students to post openings and resumes.

Cheryl Richards, senior operations manager at dbaza, stumbled across the center while looking for interns this spring. With one telephone call, her intern posting was distributed to nearly three dozen participating schools. "We got 50 to 100 responses very quickly,'' she said.

Employers typically use intern programs as a no-risk way to accomplish a project or to identify young people whom they might want to hire at some point, said Mimi Collins, a spokeswoman for the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

"Doing an internship is a great idea,'' Collins said. "Even in a terrific job market, employers are looking for people who have relevant job experience and, secondly, they will often look at their own interns first."

Internships work best when the employer identifies a specific project for the intern to work on, said Becky Reitmeyer, the center's outreach coordinator. She suggests employers also choose mentors to manage the intern or figure out in advance how to share an intern among departments.

David Malone and his partners at Gateway Financial Group, Downtown, for years dismissed the idea of using interns as unproductive. But Malone, who chairs the work-force investment board, gave a Stanford University student a try at the urging of another small business owner and discovered benefits.

"Not only did I enjoy the process -- it's always engaging being around young people and trying to challenge them -- but we also got some helpful information. These young kids are extremely adept at getting information, using the Internet to research," Malone said.

Slightly more than half -- 53 percent -- of the internships posted through the Regional Internship Center are paid positions, with either hourly wages or a stipend. The rest are unpaid or structured so that students can receive academic credit.

Holliday said the center encourages employers to pay interns. The paid positions, as one might expect, draw a bigger pool of applicants and typically are filled quickly. Unpaid positions tend to be harder to fill but there is a market for them because some schools require positions be unpaid for the student to receive academic credit.

The tight labor market this year is forcing some students who would ordinarily ignore unpaid positions to give them a look, said Donna Morrison, director of employer relations and cooperative education at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, a center participant.

Morrison said more employers, for-profit and nonprofits, are turning toward unpaid internships as their budgets and regular staff have been reduced. But she encourages them to try and find money for a student's salary.

"Quite honestly, while our students value the experience, they can't afford to volunteer,'' she said. "Parents are really upset with this. They look for that extra income a student provides" to help finance tuition or other school expenses.

Schmiel said most positions for which she applied, including the one she landed at dbaza, were unpaid. For now, she's living on savings from a college job.

T.J. Willetts, a communications major who will be a senior this fall at Robert Morris University, considered himself lucky to find a paying position as a marketing assistant at All-Pak, a container distributor in Bridgeville, where he lives.

"There were many closed doors,'' he said. "It was very difficult to find people who are willing to give you a good educational experience, especially in my field. This seemed to fit me well."

Karen Brooks, vice president of All-Pak's Qorpak division, said the company in the past sought students through existing employees or from local high schools. This year, however, the company wanted someone with college and computer graphics training and used the intern center to come up with candidates.

Brooks said she was pleased so far with Willetts, who has worked on planning, shooting and editing a product video. "This guy is wonderful,'' she said. "He's knowledgeable and putting what he's learned into every day business."

The center helped Summerbridge, an education enrichment program in Sewickley for at-risk adolescents, find 30 college students to teach middle school pupils this summer in return for small stipends, said Executive Director Leeann Younger.

"A lot of students found us instead of us having to do the work ourselves," Younger said. "The center had done its homework. I felt it was really high service."