Jessica MacNeil

Facebook is helping give interns power
December 11, 2007

Anyone who has looked for an internship knows it isn’t easy to do on your own, but now your daily visit to Facebook can help.

A new Facebook group, InternPower, is a unique program aimed at helping students get the most of all the internships available to them.

“We, at InternPower, hope to help students in the internship application and actual interning experience,” said Oriana So, who is an intern herself, working on the project. “InternPower hopes to show students how interning can help forward their career paths and choose the right career for them.”

At this stage in the process InternPower is a Facebook group that enables interns, prospective interns, and former interns to share their work experiences.

“This project is focused on bringing together interns who can share their stories, offer advice to others, and allow students to network,” said So.

“It was actually Oriana who said we should focus on building a Web site and using Facebook to get more people noticing,” said Dr. Jerry Cahn, the program’s founder.

The idea for the program came from a former intern working under Cahn.

“One of my interns, who I had the opportunity to hire, became my intern coordinator and she realized that most people who need internships have no idea how to get them,” said Cahn.

Information gathered through the discussions will be posted at a forthcoming Web site, internpower.com.

“We are launching the InternPower Web site by mid-December and it will include a community forum for students, interns, schools, and companies to post their input on internships,” said So.

The original idea was to produce a book to help students find their way through the internship process and, although the program has gone to the Web for sooner results, students can look forward to Cahn’s book on the subject of internships, which has an entertaining twist.

“Dr. Cahn also hopes to put together a book, called InternPower: What’s in it for you?, to be released next year some time,” said So. “The book will be a compilation of internship information as well as celebrity inside scoops into their interning experiences.”

“We thought we could make the book more interesting for students to read by focusing on celebrities who have had critical internships,” said Cahn.

Cahn says he was inspired to help interns after his work experience made him realize that after school “you don’t know what you need to know and there need to be more teachers to push you and stretch you.”

“Dr. Jerry Cahn, who is also a professor at Baruch College of CUNY, has hosted over 500 interns and had the idea to share his interest of internships with others and show students the power of having internships,” said So.

One of the problems with the use of interns is that they’re not trusted to be given important work and time isn’t taken to teach them the skills needed in their fields.

“Kids work at giant companies and get put in a cubby hole and stuck there,” said Cahn. “I realized I could help supervisors learn how to use interns more effectively.”

Cahn believes there are other skills that are vital for students entering the workforce to learn, that schools just don’t teach.

“I just interviewed seven students from an international school and I asked them ‘If I can only choose one of you, why should I choose you?,’" said Cahn. “They had answers like ‘I’m nice and I’ll work hard and show up on time,’ so I had a chance to teach them how you need to learn how to market yourself, which is a skill that’s never taught.”

In addition to interns, InternPower will work with supervisors who have worked with interns, internship program coordinators, and school officials to help everyone involved in the process get the most out of internships.

“The fourth leg to the chair was helping schools run their student career programs and getting corporate sponsorship because we need seed capital to get the book started,” Cahn.

Cahn is also founder and CEO of Presentation Excellence, which, according to its Web site, “is a full-spectrum resource center serving executives who want to achieve excellence in their business endeavors and professional relationships.” The company is launching the InternPower program.

Posted by Jessica MacNeil on December 11, 2007 | Comments (1)