A Taste of the Workplace for Liberal Arts Majors
New on-campus internship program offers experience, perspective
Rebecca Behrends (CAS’17) (left) and Ericka Crankshaw (CAS’18) prepare memorabilia from opera singer Deborah Voigt at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center. Photo by Cydney Scott.
When Linda Wells was dean of the College of General Studies, she was often asked by parents and students how a liberal arts education could lead to a good job. The economic downturn that began in 2008 made such questions even more compelling. So when she stepped down in 2013 after more than a decade as dean, Wells asked herself what she could do to help liberal arts students transfer their education to the workplace after graduation.
What she came up with was a new program for CAS students that combines an on-campus internship with an online course, Internship for Liberal Arts: Work and Identity—Theory and Practice. The goal is to help students gain valuable work experience and get them to think more deeply about what work means to their lives.
Rebecca Behrends (CAS’17) and Ericka Crankshaw (CAS’18) are among the 41 inaugural students enrolled in the CAS On-Campus Internship Program. On a recent morning, the two were sitting at a worktable in a cramped room at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center (HGARC) mounting memorabilia given to the center by opera singer Deborah Voigt for an upcoming exhibition of her career: newspaper clippings, costume sketches, a letter from Stephen Sondheim, even the key to the city of Vero Beach, Fla.
“Even if I might not in my future be putting artifacts onto foam core, it teaches you valuable skill sets,” says Crankshaw, who is majoring in international relations and Spanish and considering a minor in history. “You have to be precise, you have to be on top of your game. You can always apply that to life.”
Crankshaw and Behrends are working six or seven hours a week in their internships while taking Wells’ one-credit, pass/fail course.
“I wanted liberal arts students to have the opportunity that the professional students in COM and Questrom already have—to think about the workplace and how they are going to navigate that,” says Wells, now special advisor to the provost for student choices and transitions and a CGS professor of humanities.
There’s a cliché about students earning degrees in such esoteric or scholarly subjects as philosophy or anthropology only to find little in the way of practical career options. While the liberal arts are not vocational in the traditional sense, Wells says, the term is appropriate when the meaning is applied more broadly.
“I wanted to heighten awareness for arts and sciences students of the whole question of, what work will I do?” Wells says. “I expect that to be a broader conversation than, what’s my activity going to be from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.? Or, not to make it sound too highfalutin, what is my life’s work going to be?”
The course includes two face-to-face meetings and online study, but is focused on a reading list that includes Robert L. Heilbroner’s The Act of Work and chapters from such books as You Majored in What? Mapping Your Path from Chaos to Career by Katharine Brooks and Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes by William Bridges.
“The goal is to actually get them out into a workplace and thinking, what am I learning about myself? what do I really hate doing? what do I really like about work?” Wells says.
She conceived of the on-campus internships in part by remembering the years she lived on campus, and her disabled son was cared for by Sargent College occupational and physical therapy students. Those students got to work in their field and earn a little money from a part-time job that was also close by and fit into their busy schedules. (The CAS internships are unpaid, but Wells says the students could be hired to work in subsequent semesters.)
Although she had hoped that students would get outside their comfort zones, many in the program chose internships close to their existing career goals.
In the University’s Institutional Research office, Catherine Sampson (CAS’16) and Hope Kerr (CAS’16) are analyzing results from the 2014 National Survey of Student Engagement, conducted by the Indiana University School of Education Center for Postsecondary Research, comparing student attitudes and levels of engagement at BU with those on campuses around the nation. It’s a chance for hands-on experience in proposing projects, data analysis, and working with statistical software, all of which may be part of the future for both Sampson, who is majoring in economics and sociology, and Kerr, a statistics and sociology major.
“I feel like it will be a good addition to my résumé as well as maybe helping me figure out exactly what I want to do—not just a broad, generalized idea,” says Sampson. “With a business degree or in the School of Hospitality Administration or even Sargent, you kind of know what you’re going to do when you graduate. And I think this is a good opportunity to help people figure that out.”
Students’ internships are supervised by a BU staff member who has volunteered to be a mentor/supervisor. And as it turns out, the new program offers benefits to mentors as well. Linette Decarie (CAS’96, Questrom’02, SED’16), director of Institutional Research and one of three mentors in her office, says her staff likely wouldn’t have had time to tackle a data project like Sampson and Kerr are working on, given their other responsibilities.
“This gives us an opportunity to let two people get deeply involved in something they’re really passionate about that’s also useful to the University,” says Decarie.
The Gotlieb Center alone has taken on 14 interns, with Behrends, Crankshaw, and 2 others working under the supervision of Christopher Gately, the center’s exhibitions, outreach, and arts administrator.
“My major is in the history of art and architecture, so I am interested in possibly doing museum work in the future,” says Behrends. “This is a great opportunity for me to learn the backstage way everything is put together.” Internships at institutions like Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts tend to be highly competitive, especially with so many colleges nearby, she says. Working at HGARC might also help her get one of those in the future. And the readings add another level.
“As long as it fits what we’re going through,” she says, “I think it’s a good opportunity for us to read and contemplate.”
The Voigt exhibition, which opens September 29, is a win-win for both the center and the interns, says Gately. It helps students’ become more interested in HGARC’s extensive collections, and gives them valuable hands-on curatorial experience. “This kind of display—especially students working on it and kind of creating it—is one of the things we feel is really important,” he says, noting that his interns will also be working on correspondence by Theodore Roosevelt for an upcoming exhibition and helping to inventory the Gotlieb’s art collection.
“It’s a lot of different jobs and learning experiences I hope they can use going forward in their careers,” he says. “This internship is for them to learn work skills and get them ready for their next step after college, and I’m doing my best to show them a whole different range of ways to work.”
The CAS On-Campus Internship Program spring semester internship opportunities will be posted in October. The current list will give students an idea of the type of positions available. Those interested in developing additional program internships should contact Linda Wells at lwells@bu.edu.
Author, Joel Brown can be reached at jbnbpt@bu.edu.