Faculty Interns: A Bargain for Business, a Bonus for the Classroom

Workforce, August, 2001 by Evelyn Beck

When college professors come to the workplace, companies gain knowledge and send back instructors who better understand how business operates.

College students have long been a source of interns for business and industry. But a potentially more beneficial source--and one that more companies are now discovering--may be the students' professors. In what has been described as one of the best-kept secrets in business, faculty interns are bringing expertise to business and industry, and returning to classrooms with real-world experience to better educate students and to advise them of job opportunities. Workplace internships of weeks and even months are providing college instructors with an opportunity to apply theory to reality, and to help companies gain valuable expertise and a recruiting edge.

Ohio State University business professor Gwendolyn O'Neal spent the fall of 1996 working and observing at The Limited's headquarters in Columbus. Her primary mission was to learn more about how a company operates in order to improve her classroom skills. As a professor of apparel marketing, buying, and

fashion forecasting, she'd spent years sharing concerns with recruiters about the gaps between the classroom and the workplace. "One of the complaints we would hear from recruiters was the inability to find people with the expertise they were looking for," she says. O'Neal bemoaned the fact that all available textbooks were based on the traditional department store model, in which buyers go to market to view designer lines and then place orders. This approach contrasts with a vertical operation like The Limited's, in which the company owns the product from conception to distribution. "I asked recruiters, 'Why don't you allow us into your organization so we can learn the process you're using?'"

O'Neal's interest eventually sparked an unpaid three-month internship at The Limited during a fall semester when she wasn't scheduled to teach. The experience, she says, "changed not how I taught but the kinds of concepts relevant to the process of moving products. It broadened my conception." By participating in executive meetings, examining company records, and spending time with buyers and product developers, she gained a deeper understanding of private store lines and of the vertical approach used by The Limited and most department stores.

The environment she observed was intense and stressful, with staff engaged in multiple activities that included tracing a shipment, evaluating the quality of merchandise received, and making decisions about what to produce next. It was a high-risk enterprise with the potential for great profits, helping O'Neal realize that her students had to know something about every aspect of the apparel business and that they had to prepare themselves to function under pressure.

Like others familiar with the faculty internship concept, Stephen Dahms, chair of the Biotechnology Industry Association Workforce Committee and a professor of chemistry at San Diego State University, views the opportunity to place faculty in short-term business positions as vital. "A major problem facing workforce development is the lack of knowledge of university faculty as to what actually goes on in industry," he says. He finds that most faculty are ignorant of the way biotech companies are organized, how regulated they are, and even the meaning of basic acronyms like QA (quality assurance) or TQM (total quality management). "Most faculty just see the industry as jockeying genes around and throwing cells in culture. They don't understand that there are products involved."

Richard Weibl, the editor of Postdoc Network, which links postdoctoral scientists, adds that employers wish students were better trained in workplace skills such as teamwork and oral communication. He says he has found that graduate students in the sciences often work alone in laboratories and aren't able to explain their research to a marketing colleague or a venture capitalist.

Four years ago, MYCOM, a Cincinnati e-business and communications company, hired technical communications professor Sandra Harner of Cedarville University, a small Baptist college in Ohio, for a 10-week summer internship. She created several technical documents for MYCOM and trained the company's employees in writing skills.

At SCANA, an energy services company in Columbia, South Carolina, a business professor at the nearby state university developed an internal leadership Web site as part of an internship program. And in Troy, Michigan, Automotive Youth Educational Systems sponsors a program geared to middle- and high-school automotive technology teachers. Car dealerships nationwide are encouraged to hire educators for periods ranging from several days to a year. Often they work during the summer, the peak period for service work at most dealerships, says AYES president Donald Gray. Instructors might perform quality monitoring, write up repair orders, work in parts departments, or serve as assistant managers for larger stores.