Freshmen/Alumni Summer Internship Program (F/ASIP)

Over the last few months we have started a small new program to place freshmen in summer internships in companies where they will have interesting work, and will have alumni mentors to help acclimate them to the workplace. The idea for this program was suggested and promoted by Joel Moses, to whom I am very grateful, since it is a wonderful idea. There are a number of reasons for starting this program which, I think, will help remediate what some of us think are serious problems in our undergraduate education.

A constructive summer experience will go far to combat the loss of self-esteem that many of our students suffer in coming to MIT. Many of us notice that our happiest upperclassmen are those who had an internship experience during the summer. Such students are happy because they get to see that their MIT education has a real value in the outside world, and they can then begin to feel better about the tough academic year they have just been through. This positive experience should be transferable to the freshman year as well.

These internships may also help change the attitude of MIT undergraduates toward written and oral communication. By placing interns in situations where they can see the importance that others place on these capabilities, our students will be more eager to learn to communicate better when they return to campus in the fall.

Another important skill we wish our students to be more positive about is teamwork. MIT emphasizes, and appropriately so in many cases, the importance of individual work. Yet teamwork is increasingly important in many careers. Our students should adjust to this work style when they see it in action.

Finally, the MIT ethos of hard work and attacking absolutely any problem, inculcated early at the Institute, is not seen as an asset by many undergraduates. But our alumni frequently tell us how important this aspect of their education was to them when they entered the workplace. We hope the freshmen interns will also see this at work, and will bring a more positive appreciation of MIT's pace and pressure back to the campus with them.

An important component of these internships is to involve MIT alumni in them. Many alumni have asked how they can help the Institute in ways other than by donating money. Our alumni also can recall well their experiences at MIT, and can thus understand what the current students are going through. We see this as a unique opportunity for alumni to have a positive mentoring effect on a group of students. The fallout from this will be that when these students return in the fall they will help change the malaise and disaffection of many MIT students toward what is happening to them at the Institute.

The response from students to this internship program was overwhelming this year; 64 applied for 22 jobs, and they are now being placed in internships in companies where they will have close contact with alumni. We began this year with companies in northern California and the Boston area. [Our greatest support has come from Teradyne through the efforts of MIT Corporation Chairman Alex d'Arbeloff.] The alumni will act as mentors for the students, though the students may be working under non-alum supervisors. We expect that the students will get together with their classmates over the summer, and will also have contact with alumni in senior positions at businesses in the area.

To prepare the students for their experience we organized a seminar this spring which consisted of a series of workshops. These workshops were run by myself, Marshall Hughes (staff member in F/ASIP) and Sarah Wu (a freshman). These workshops were facilitated by a marvelous group of people drawn from MIT staff and participating companies in the Boston area. Students worked in small groups with a facilitator on resume writing, interviewing, holding meetings and writing memos, and dealing with difficult confrontational situations. The final workshop was an elaborate design game in which we tried to put all these skills together. Students were divided into teams, and had to design an elaborate museum case. In order to win the contract for it they had to reserve factory space, buy supplies, build a prototype, make a budget, and present a proposal to the museum board. Facilitators helped to make this a realistic work situation and pushed the students to propose designs that would make a profit for their company.

While in the workplace students will be keeping journals about their experiences and observations, and will then write a 2500 word paper for submission to us in the fall. They will also have to give an oral presentation when they are back on campus, which we will use to recruit the next group of freshmen.

Students are paid over the summer by the participating companies, and receive academic credit in the fall for having completed the accompanying seminar. What has been extremely gratifying is the positive response and excitement that we have seen from both the students and alumni. We expect this program will grow much larger over the next few years. Please tell students about it next fall!

For more information about F/ASIP visit our Website at <http://web.mit.edu/fasip/www>, or e-mail me <arthurs@mit.edu> or Marshall Hughes <devil@mit.edu>.