If an organization internship imparts some knowledge to the scholars it employs, that’s sometimes adequate. If these interns train an organization about itself, flip weaknesses into strengths and create a greater future for everybody concerned, that’s the best final result.
Seven years in the past, Common Motors paired its Chevrolet model with the Nationwide Newspaper Publishers Affiliation (NNPA) to launch “Uncover the Surprising,” a 10-week internship and scholarship program that enables HBCU college students to attempt advertising and marketing with Chevrolet and community-based journalism with the NNPA. This 12 months, 10 college students from Howard, Morehouse, Delaware State, Florida A&M and Hampton obtained a $10,000 scholarship and an $8,000 stipend whereas spending the summer time creating their abilities on the highway.
Over the summer time, Chevy’s DTU interns took a 2024 Chevy Trax throughout the U.S. whereas creating social-media content material based mostly on the automobile’s security options that multicultural company of report Carol H. Williams become digital content material for the NNPA website. With assist from Chevy’s social, experiential and customer-relationship administration groups, college students took the Trax from a boot camp session with entrepreneurs and mentors in Detroit to the NNPA Nationwide Conference in Nashville, a Tennessee State College DTU content material shoot, the HBCU Swingman Basic throughout Main League Baseball’s All-Star sport in Seattle and behind-the-scenes at a Chevrolet Experience and Drive occasion.
Up to now, this system has given 59 college students from 22 completely different HBCUs greater than $750,000, but in addition a chance to advance their careers. Three former DTU fellows have since been employed by GM, with one returning as an intern in GM’s communications division this 12 months. Extra have been employed by NNPA publications, with this 12 months’s fellows contributing to the The Tennessee Tribune, Washington Informer, Philadelphia Tribune, Atlanta Voice, Houston Ahead Time and Dallas Examiner.
“What we see as an enormous alternative is pipeline growth,” stated Charles Chapman, GM’s multicultural advertising and marketing supervisor who leads the DTU program. “By way of bringing in these college students, they’re inexperienced, they’re studying, however what we’ve finished is uncover quite a lot of gems.”
