Late last spring, a U.S. News & World Report story on internships placed Wagner College among the country’s top ten universities.
Nationally, “on average, 38 percent of the class of 2013 participated in an internship during their undergraduate careers,” wrote reporter Susannah Snider.
But at Wagner, every student has an internship experience while they’re earning their bachelor’s degree — part of the Wagner Plan philosophy of “learning by doing.”
And internships provide Wagner business and accounting students with plenty of “doing” opportunities in some of the world’s leading organizations — opportunities that involve lots more than making coffee or filing papers.
T. J. Schwannecke ’17 was put through his paces at Hull Street Capital, a private equity firm focused on investments from $5 million to $100 million.
“Hull Street really allowed me to get involved in the process,” Schwannecke said. “I saw how important my computer skills are — Excel, PowerPoint, Java. And knowing how accounting, finance, and the economy really work really helped me.”
At the Securities and Exchange Commission, Jennifer Haug ’17 learned how myriad seemingly inconsequential details can add up to a criminal indictment.
“I worked on several cases of fraud and insider trading with forensic accountants and lawyers, transcribing thousands of pages of wire records into Excel and searching for patterns of suspicious activity,” Haug said.
The experience looks great on her resume.
“Every interview I’ve had since, the interviewer has stressed how great my relevant work experience is at the SEC.”
Christopher “C. J.” Jarema ’16 stretched his Wagner training further than he could have imagined at Dow Jones and UBS.
“I was given a lot of work, typically juggling five or more projects at once,” he said. “However, the environment around me was forgiving and fostered my ability to handle it. I encouraged my supervisor to push me further and make me better in what I struggled with.”
For some Wagner students, their internship leads directly to their first professional job offer.
“I was placed on a team with a handful of other professionals, but I was the only intern for the two months I spent there,” Danielle Bruscella ’15 M’16 said, describing her experience last summer at Deloitte. “I was perhaps very lucky in that I participated in preparing a number of audit work papers. Since it was the summer, many other interns with whom I networked were not given this kind of responsibility.”
The result?
“I received an offer to return, full-time, following graduation this May.”
