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Q&A
Council Member Dinowitz discusses future opportunities and challenges for CUNY internships with city agencies
1:15:54
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Council Member Eric Dinowitz engages in a Q&A session with Lauren Andersen from CUNY about expanding internship and fellowship opportunities with city agencies. They discuss potential partnerships, outreach efforts, challenges faced, and ways the City Council can support these programs.
- Andersen expresses CUNY's desire to work with more city and state agencies, highlighting current partnerships and growth potential.
- Challenges discussed include funding, student availability due to work commitments, and the need for flexible internship models.
- The conversation explores ways to make internships more accessible, including part-time options and increased mentorship.
Eric Dinowitz
1:15:54
Thank you, Chair Del Arosa.
1:15:56
So looking forward, do you see what opportunities do you see in the future with the agencies to serve as interns or fellows?
1:16:03
What agencies could be potential partners for CUNY.
Lauren Andersen
1:16:10
We are delighted to work with more city and state agencies.
1:16:13
Thank you for the question.
1:16:14
It's appreciated.
1:16:17
The opportunity community, though we work with 14 agencies today within our community internship program, obviously, that leaves a lot of room for growth.
1:16:25
There are a lot of agencies that are not partnering with us on that, and we would love to expand that.
1:16:31
Additionally, our industry support hub, as I mentioned earlier, which isn't only focused on internships, it's focused on full time hiring too.
1:16:39
As I mentioned, they work with 76 different city and state agencies.
1:16:42
And amongst those agencies, the majority are city agencies, but still not as many as we would like to see on there.
1:16:51
So we tend to work with and are happy to provide a list afterwards of all of those agencies.
1:16:58
Many of the large agencies that have come to us that employ a lot of people, but the thing that we often times can reach to some of the smaller agencies who we don't have existing partnerships with.
1:17:07
So anything that can be done to expand our outreach to them as well as the city council would be very welcome.
Eric Dinowitz
1:17:13
So to so are are you conducting those outreach efforts, or are you asking for support from the city council in terms of connecting you with agencies or both?
Lauren Andersen
1:17:26
So definitely when it comes to getting more city council offices involved in our ETR program.
1:17:32
We'd love to do that directly with you.
1:17:34
In terms of city agencies, we do conduct outreach to them on a regular basis.
1:17:38
Obviously, a call to action around this is very helpful no matter what.
Gale A. Brewer
1:17:41
Mhmm.
Eric Dinowitz
1:17:41
And and what have been some of the challenges in working with city agencies, whether it relates to funding, advertising, personnel policies, or anything else?
Lauren Andersen
1:17:53
So funding is certainly a challenge at the agencies as I alluded to before because we do not use these programs to connect students to unpaid opportunities.
1:18:04
That's something that we don't necessarily promote through our office.
1:18:08
So funding is certainly an issue.
1:18:09
Some of the other issues we encounter are generally true whether we're talking about the public sector or our private sector internships, which is Kenny students are very diverse.
1:18:20
Half of them come from families that are in less than $30,000 a year in family income.
1:18:25
So many students have full time jobs.
1:18:27
And when they're thinking about the trade off between getting rid of their full time year round job and taking an internship that doesn't necessarily have a guarantee of immediately leading to a full time job thereafter.
1:18:40
It's a challenging trade off for them.
1:18:42
So what we've attempted to do through our programs to address the challenge of not making it a 0 sum game for students, leave your full time job to take this internship that'll advance your career.
1:18:51
We've done a lot of work with city agencies to try to think about part time internship programs that students can do while they're working, while they're in school.
1:18:59
We also revamped our big summer internship program to be more flexible in terms of hours allowing for part time hours, not requiring full time hours so that more students can actually advantage of it while preserving the incomes that they need to stay in school.
Eric Dinowitz
1:19:11
And how's that been?
1:19:12
Have the city agencies been receptive to part time interns?
Lauren Andersen
1:19:16
Yes, definitely.
1:19:17
Our the city agencies we've been working with are interested in retaining the students that come to their door.
1:19:23
As we've alluded to, they're very eager to have these students.
1:19:26
So we found that there have been, particularly over the last 3 years, very interested in thinking about not just how they can have time models that will bring more students on, but also thinking about how they are clear in providing more mentorship and helping students stay in their internships and continue on.
Eric Dinowitz
1:19:42
And what else?
1:19:43
I mean, you mentioned a few things, but what else could the city council do to provide more support for the collaboration and the collaborative internship and fellowship programs run by CUNY and city agencies.
Lauren Andersen
1:19:55
We always appreciate the opportunity to highlight them.
1:19:57
So thank you this in and of itself is very useful.
1:20:01
I think some of your points and and valid points in terms of challenging us to be clearer about the opportunities is a good note for us to take back and working on.
1:20:10
In the meantime, I think the more that a call to action, as I mentioned, around agencies participating in these programs, opening up these pipelines, is useful coming from everywhere, including city council.
Eric Dinowitz
1:20:20
I'll turn it back to chair, Delirosa.