What would it look like if every college student—not just the ones who knew to ask, or had the time, or could afford to go unpaid—actually got a meaningful work-based learning experience before graduation?
That’s not a hypothetical at ODU. It’s the mandate.
In this episode of the Career Everywhere Podcast, host Meredith Metsker sits down with Dr. Barbara Blake, Chief Internship Officer and Executive Director of the Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office at Old Dominion University, for the first installment of a two-part conversation.
The Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office doesn’t run career fairs. It doesn’t do resume workshops. It has one job: make sure every ODU student—regardless of major, college, or background—has a work-based learning experience before they walk across the stage. That singular focus is what sets it apart from ODU’s traditional career center, and from most career services models entirely.
That focus is also by design. ODU is a minority-serving institution with high Pell and first-gen populations and a large military-connected community—students who are statistically less likely to complete internships and who face real barriers to access, from transportation to professional attire to the simple reality of not being able to afford to work for free. Barbara built her office around the belief that those barriers are solvable, and that solving them requires dedicated infrastructure, not just good intentions.
In part one, Barbara and Meredith dig into how the office came to be, how it sits within ODU’s broader ecosystem alongside the Center for Career and Leadership Development, and how four distinct pathways—for-credit internship courses, a free zero-credit co-curricular course, prior learning assessment, and prior internship recognition—are making sure work-based learning is accessible, documented, and on the transcript where employers can see it.
Stay tuned for part two, dropping later in July, where Barbara and Meredith get into the office’s biggest wins so far, what their funding strategy looks like, how they address challenges around unpaid internships, and what’s next for the office.
Key takeaways:
- Placing internships in Academic Affairs changes everything. The Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office reports to the Provost—a deliberate choice that signals internships are part of the learning journey, not an optional add-on. Barbara says she wouldn’t have taken the job if it had been placed anywhere else.
- One focus. One job. Unlike traditional career centers, which carry a wide range of responsibilities, the Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office has a single mandate: help every ODU student get a meaningful work-based learning experience. That clarity of purpose is both a strategy and a cultural statement.
- Four pathways make work-based learning accessible to more students. For-credit internship courses, a free zero-credit co-curricular course, prior learning assessment, and prior internship recognition give students multiple ways to have their experiences acknowledged.
- Getting it on the transcript is the goal. Barbara’s office treats the transcript as the primary deliverable. When graduates send transcripts to employers, having an internship listed there becomes a conversation starter—and a differentiator. Several ODU graduates have already reported that their transcript note was the first thing an interviewer brought up.
- You have to change the culture before you can change the numbers. The office’s first priority wasn’t programming—it was shifting campus-wide language from “if” students do an internship to “when.” That required buy-in from the president, the provost, faculty, and staff, and Barbara credits top-down institutional commitment as foundational to the office’s early success.
- Capturing invisible internships matters. Many students are already doing internships that their institutions don’t know about. ODU’s free co-curricular course has documented over 500 internships that would otherwise have gone unrecognized—along with the employers and students behind them.
- High touch isn’t just a nice-to-have for this population. ODU serves high Pell, high first-gen, and military-connected students who need real guidance, not just a job board. Barbara describes an approach that feels more like a human resources office than a traditional career center—open Monday through Friday, no remote work, and ready to help students think through the actual logistics of getting an internship, from financial constraints to geography to timing.
About the guest:
Dr. Barbara Blake is the Chief Internship Officer and Executive Director of the Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. An economist by training, she has taught economics for over 20 years, conducted economic research for NATO, worked in the corporate world for companies like Hanes Mexico, and owned her own consulting business. Since launching the Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office in July 2023, her team has secured $8.5 million in funding from more than 20 funders and built one of the most distinctive experiential learning models in higher education. Dr. Blake holds a master’s degree from the University of Leeds and has published and presented original economic research in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Resources from the episode:
- Dr. Blake’s LinkedIn profile
- Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office at ODU
- Stay tuned for part two of this conversation, dropping later in July, for more on the internship office’s biggest wins so far, what their funding strategy looks like, how they address challenges around unpaid internships, and what’s next for the office.
Meredith Metsker:
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Career Everywhere Podcast. I’m your host, Meredith Metsker. For this episode, I am joined by Dr. Barbara Blake, the chief internship officer and executive director of the Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office at Old Dominion University. Barbara and I had such an amazing conversation that I asked her if she’d be willing to stay on a little bit longer so we can make our first ever two-part episode, and she was kind enough to say yes.
So in this episode, part one, Barbara and I really dig into the origin story of the Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office at ODU. We talk about why the office was established in 2023, how it’s structured, how it’s different from a traditional career center, and how they make internships accessible for every single student. Plus, we start off with some fun stories from Barbara’s professional background, including her time doing economic research for NATO. Then in part two, we dig into the internship and co-op office’s biggest win so far, what their funding strategy looks like, how they address challenges around unpaid internships, and what’s next for the office. I hope you enjoy part one of my conversation with Barbara, and stay tuned for part two.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Career Everywhere Podcast. I’m your host, Meredith Metsker. Today I am joined by Dr. Barbara Blake, the chief internship officer and executive director of the Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office at Old Dominion University. Thank you for joining me, Barbara.
Barbara Blake:
It’s a pleasure to be here.
Meredith Metsker:
Yeah, I am so glad to have you today, and I am really excited to talk to you about the Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office there at ODU. It’s a unique approach to experiential learning, and I know you all are doing some really innovative work over there to give every ODU student access to work-based learning opportunities. So I’m excited to dig into how the office is structured, what initiatives you’re prioritizing, what results you’re seeing, and hear a little bit about what’s next for internships there at ODU.
Barbara Blake:
Thank you for having me.
Meredith Metsker:
Yeah, this is going to be so much fun. Before I get into my questions, Barbara, is there anything else you would like to add about yourself, your background, or your role there at ODU?
Barbara Blake:
Well, thank you first for having me on, and I’m so delighted to be here and talk a little bit about Old Dominion University. I would say, probably the first thing that I would tell anyone is that I’m a very non-traditional academic. I had a life in corporate. I have worked for NGOs. I’ve done economic research. I’ve owned my own consulting business. But I’ve always loved to teach. I’ve taught economics for over 20 years. I have published, presented original economic research in the United States and in the UK. I did my master’s at the University of Leeds in Leeds, England. So anytime that I look at career prep, internships, I’m always looking at it through the lens of the labor market and the value of labor.
I think, first and foremost, when I talk about my work at the Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office, and as we first developed in 2023, it was really looking at economic development and what are the roles of students in our economy, in our labor market, in the supply and demand of openings and shortages, and how can we think about that in new and creative ways? Again, I work for Hanes Mexico. I speak Spanish. So I’ve been in that revenue-generating inventory world. I’ve been in nonprofit work as well.
So I think if someone has a wide variety of experiences, then you’re much better to be able especially to work with a student who’s maybe not quite sure of what they want to do or where they want to go because they don’t know. Well, what’s the difference between a for-profit and a nonprofit? What if I want to work for the military or if I want to work for the federal government in another role? So I really do believe that my experiences just put me in a good place to help students and help them understand everything that’s available to them because there’s a lot and sometimes students can get overwhelmed too.
Meredith Metsker:
Oh yeah, that’s an incredible background. I always love hearing how people come to be in this kind of field because there’s no one same journey. Everyone comes into career services or the internship space from a different place. So I love hearing the background. If I’m recalling correctly in our prep call, I think you mentioned you did economic research for NATO among other organizations.
Barbara Blake:
Yes. Yes. I am in Norfolk, Virginia, and Norfolk is the North American headquarters for NATO. I was doing some economic research for a global project on urbanization and what would cities look like in the future if we were technologically driven. Didn’t really dive into AI. This was a project from 2014 to 2016. But just talking about technology, and how will the world operate in 2030? How will the world operate in 2045? Very exciting stuff. What will the economy look like? I think, especially today, now that we’re talking about AI and processing and automating work versus augmenting work, I think it’s all very topical stuff for today.
Meredith Metsker:
Yeah, no kidding. Your students are so lucky to have your breadth of knowledge. That’s so cool. Before I move into the rest of my questions, I’m curious, given your background, what drew you to the internship and co-op space as opposed to maybe a more traditional career services role?
Barbara Blake:
Yeah. Prior to this role, I was chief administrative officer for the Dragas Center for Research in the Strome College of Business. I’ve been at ODU since 2015, so my home has been in the Department of Economics and Economic Regional and Research for the Commonwealth of Virginia. What drew me were those things connected to the labor market, because if you look at some of my previous research, I’ve done work with offenders in the labor market. You’ve exited, how do you get back in? I’ve done work with the economic impact of opioids. Again, once you’ve left, how do you get back in? Because I have a real firm personal belief that everyone deserves economic stability. If we don’t have economic stability, what kind of lives are we going to have? Because we all need employment. We all need income in order to survive and live our lives.
So when our president, President Hemphill, really said, “I want to do something new. I want something inventive, and I want something for every student because every student deserves to have an internship or work-based learning experience,” I was immediately drawn to that message because I firmly believe that all of our students, they need that academic credential, that bachelor’s, that’s with them for the rest of their life. Once they’ve earned it, it is with us for the rest of our life, and no one can ever take it away per se. But how do you really go into the labor market? How do you really begin a career if you have had no experience? I know there’s a lot of dialogue on the entry-level job and that paradox that, “Well, it’s entry level. How many years of experience do you have?” For a lot of our entry level who just graduate with their degree, not that much. It’s sort of the joke of saying, “Yeah, I needed five years experience to get into the entry-level job.”
So this vision for the Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office, we’re the only freestanding office that serves all students. All students are served by us, not just a particular college or school. It’s really speaking to that need. We need to make sure that our students know what’s an internship, what’s a co-op, what’s a clinical placement, what’s a field work experience, that they really need to know what’s out there in the marketplace for them to develop those knowledge, skills, and abilities, and really just that personal belief that everyone of our students deserves an amazing experience.
Now, I do caveat that and I say maybe you didn’t like it. Maybe you found out that “I don’t want to work on a construction site” or “I don’t want to work in a cubicle all day.” But what has that done? Because maybe the most important thing about our internship office is we help the students answer the question, “Do I see myself doing this for the rest of my life or for the near future?” To have an answer to that question I think is just so important. Good, bad, or ugly, it’s a very important question to have an answer to.
Meredith Metsker:
Yeah, for sure. I always like to say that figuring out what you don’t want to do is just as important as figuring out what you do want to do.
Barbara Blake:
Absolutely. A lot of times in the internship space, everybody thinks, “Well, that’s for junior or senior.” I’m sorry, but you don’t want a senior going into a K through 12 classroom for the first time and then saying, “I don’t want to be in a classroom with this many children,” or, “I don’t want to do this. I thought I did.” That’s a hard pivot your senior year. So one of the other things that we’re doing here is, we want to get students engaged as soon as possible. So is that the summer before their rising sophomore year? Fine.
I also say if we can get them in an adjacent experience, maybe that engineering internship or that teaching clinical, the practicum. Maybe that doesn’t come until they’re at least a junior or have so many hours, but can we get them adjacent? Can we get them into a school system? Can we get them into a construction office? Even for our students that would like to go into law. ODU does not have a law, a school, but can I get them adjacent? Can I get them in the environment so that they can understand the path that they’re thinking about? So any of those experiences, we really see as good experiences because there’s so many lessons to be taught.
Meredith Metsker:
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I am excited to kind of dig into some more specifics about the Monarch Office here in just a minute. But before I get into those more specific questions, I do want to ask you a question that I ask all of our guests here on the podcast, and that’s, what does Career Everywhere mean to you?
Barbara Blake:
First of all, I love it because it really speaks to something that I feel very passionate about. When we talk about a typical student preparing for their future, and where are they going to go, what is their next chapter looking like, that is not held by any one office. It’s not owned by any one unit in higher education. It doesn’t matter if it’s four year, two-year community college, junior, it doesn’t matter. We all have a role in working with those students to make the connections between, “Oh, you’re interested in this degree,” or, “You’re interested in this certification,” or, “You’re interested in this industry.” Well, we owe it to those students that by the time they leave our institutions, that they are fully informed, that they know about the labor market. Maybe it’s something that doesn’t exist in your geography saying, “This is great. You know the hubs in Ohio, right?” Just that we all have a part to play in teaching students about this whole process.
Oftentimes folks would say, “Oh, well, you’re really interested in getting them the internship.” And I said, “Yes, but I’m also interested in persistence.” I want them to persist into the internship. And then also, once they’ve finished it, I want to make sure that they know how to describe that experience on their resume. How can they talk about it to faculty? How can they talk about it at a networking event or to a future employer? So all the facets, it’s just not the one facet that we know career readiness, career prep. It’s such just a huge topic, but everyone has a part to play because we all have a role.
I think ultimately all universities are economic drivers. They have a role to play in economic development for the creation of new labor. So from the faculty member to the staff member, career services, internship office, maybe it’s service learning office, maybe it’s applied high impact practices office, whatever the office is called, it’s not just one office that owns the space. Everyone should have a part to play in teaching our students how to be the best versions of themselves and to take care of themselves after they’ve left our institution.
Meredith Metsker:
Well said. Also, it reminds me too of, I guess, another Virginia colleague now, Christian Garcia. When he was at the University of Miami, their career center’s motto was, “Make career services everybody’s business.” And that’s what I was just thinking about as you were talking. It’s like, it has to be everyone involved. It can’t just be the career center or the internship center. It has to be literally everyone on campus.
Barbara Blake:
Yeah. But I think in order to really be effective with those types of pleas, we do have to talk about some trickier things. If we play devil’s advocate, having a great conversation here to say faculty might look at you and say, “Well, I’m not getting their budget to do that job.”
Meredith Metsker:
True.
Barbara Blake:
Right? So how do we have bigger conversations about resources and who’s doing what? Maybe I don’t need a huge budget to do the things that are important for career prep and readiness. Has anyone talked about that? Or has anyone developed those faculty partnerships? So there’s a lot of space to talk in that area, but I do think sometimes we do have to talk about the things that nobody really wants to talk about in order to think, “Well, why isn’t it?” So if we would all like there to be a shared responsibility in a shared space, and we don’t have that, “So why don’t we have that?” And then we take a look at those barriers and we think, “Well, how do we overcome those barriers on perception?” Is it resource allocation? What is happening in spaces that is siloing this particular topic? Sometimes those are hard conversations to have, but they’re important ones.
Meredith Metsker:
Yeah. Yeah, agreed. Yeah. Okay. Now I would love to dig into our topic today, Barbara, which is again, all about the Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office there at ODU that you lead. To start us off with some context, can you share more about what it is, how it’s structured, where it lives in the university ecosystem, and then what makes it different from a traditional career center?
Barbara Blake:
Absolutely. Well, in full disclosure, in 2022, our institution was going through a strategic planning process. What’s working, what’s not working? What do we want to improve? What do we want to see more movement on? Or what’s more important to us now? I think many institutions around the United States have done that, especially in the whole pre-COVID era. We’ve been through all these shocks, maybe even lost some students along the way. So how do we all recover from the COVID period, and how do we look forward for the rest of the COVID decade, if you will, and how do we look into 2030 and beyond?
So through that strategic planning process, it became very, very clear that we’re a very large R1 university. So we have a lot of programs, we have a lot of initiatives, we have a lot of faculty. I think we have over 5,000 employees at ODU. What was happening is, employers in our region and in Virginia were having a tough time getting to the talent to say, “I need interns. I want to work with you. I want to come into your classroom and talk about what an intern would do.” So because of a system that is decentralized, and, well, maybe they’re going to talk to this college, or maybe they’ll go to career services, or maybe they’ll go to a friend of their dad’s. It could go anywhere. So the thought process between the strategic planning was that we needed a standalone office that would be a research, I’m sorry, a resource for all students regardless if they were undergraduate, graduate, and that this office would be a high touch office to help students, especially after COVID.
One of the things that we saw was that unfortunately because of shutdowns, we had a lot of incoming freshman students that they never had the first job at Dairy Queen. They didn’t work. They didn’t even have a high school graduation. So coming into college and talking about, “Well, you need to do a co-op,” there was a lot of, “Wait a minute, well, what is that? I’ve never had a job before.” So really high touch service for students. We serve a lot of first gen. We serve a lot of military. So helping those students to be in spaces that maybe none of their family members had ever been and maybe they didn’t even have a clue. We had a student to come in and say, “My faculty member says I need to do this, and my mom says I need to do this. I don’t even know what this is. What’s the difference between an internship and a co-op?”
So that was our job, that we would be the resource for students. We would be the resource for faculty who needed assistance. “Do you want to write a grant? We’ll include the interns, and the Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office will help get you interns into your lab.” So really a resource, and if there was an employer who wanted ODU students, that they could call our number 757-683-JOBS, and they could say, “I would like interns. I want to speak to someone about interns this summer,” and this was the stop. It wasn’t, “Well, call over here.” “Oh, okay.” “Well, health sciences, call over there.” “Oh, wait a minute, marketing, call over here,” that that would end, that there would be no more of this moving around on campus, that they would come here, and we would figure out, “Okay, well, marketing and communications, well, we have this program in arts and letters. We have this program in business. We have this.” Bring all the stakeholders to the table. And then we design and work around what that employer’s needs would be because we know, as you know, as listeners know, do we have enough internships?
Well, sometimes we’re going to have to be creative, and we’re going to have to create new internships. We’re going to have to create new ways of engagement. So in July of 2023, the Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office opened its doors. We weren’t quite sure what was going to happen, and immediately, we had an incredible demand. I was the first one who was hired, and I moved over from the College of Business. So I was in suite, and the rest of the team had not even been hired yet, and the phone is ringing off the hook. There’s a hundred emails, and then media is at the door. And then I got a call from our ODU media office, and they said, “Well, you were just picked up by Yahoo, and it’s 56 million hits.” And I had no idea. I had no idea that this concept was such an underserved one. The number of employees coming from business, coming from our partners saying, “Oh, I’m so glad. I’m so glad that I can talk to you.”
It’s really been an amazing ride. To this point, we have received $8.5 million. Just think about it, it just three years. So this is private sources, this is for-profit sources, this is an NSF grant, this is a federal SIP grant. I mean, there are just lots of different funders so that we can continue to do the work that we do.
Now, I will say what’s important to note here is that my office is under academic affairs. So I report to the provost and the vice provost because we truly feel that an internship, a co-op, apprenticeship, clinical, these are not just optional experiences. This is required for the learning journey. I don’t know if I would’ve taken this job if it would’ve been placed anywhere else, because I don’t want to be with food services and sororities and fraternities. I don’t want to be looked at as optional or something that you might could do. I love the fact that this office is in academic affairs. We have been resourced from the very beginning in addition to the external funding. And that this is a priority, that before our students leave Old Dominion University, they’re going to walk off that stage with that academic credential, but they are going to have an experience, that they are going to have an internship in their industry.
We know that industries and disciplines all don’t use the same words. I think there’s like 23 different words that describe work-based learning. So we say whatever is appropriate for the discipline in the industry, then that’s what we’re going to support them in because we want them to leave here and be prepared, be prepared for the next journey. Is it going to be graduate school or professional studies? Is it into the labor market for full-time employment? Wherever it is that they’re going next, we want to make sure that they are prepared. They have that academic credential, and they have that experience that’s really going to set them apart. Again, as I said, sometimes the best question I can help students to answer is, “Can I see myself doing this for a living?”
So those are all the reasons why this office was developed, and we are different. It’s a non-traditional model. I often think, in a traditional career services, there’s so much emphasis. Well, okay, they graduated, did they get a job? Whereas I love my placement because I have them for four years. If they’re in a master’s program, I’m for two years, and of course, a doctoral program is much, much longer. But I have them for this block of time where I’m trying to get them not one, but multiple internships or work-based learning experiences, because I feel like if our team here can do our jobs, that part about graduating and getting the full-time role, I have to believe from our own empirical evidence that we have, that we collect on our campus, to national evidence, that that turnover rate going from an intern to a full-time employee is going to be much easier.
Meredith Metsker:
Yeah, that is such great context and a great overview, Barbara. Thank you. I’m curious, just for many of our listeners, because they tend to work in more traditional career centers, can you talk more a little bit about what you each own? So like what the internship and co-op center owns, what the traditional career center or centers, what they own, I would love to hear more about that relationship.
Barbara Blake:
Yeah. Right now at ODU, we do have a different model. So we have the Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office, which includes the Monarch Humanities Academy, which exclusively works with our students in College of Arts and Letters to obtain a meaningful work-based learning, especially with pay. So that’s history, English, Asian studies. And then we have a couple of other initiatives, the Strome Entrepreneurial Center. We have some other programs that are here trying to meet students where they’re at with their entrepreneurs. It doesn’t matter if they’re majoring in engineering or health sciences. Well, everyone is an entrepreneur, and we have entrepreneurial experiences for them.
So we have those programs that will be immediately available for our students. So as long as they are an active student, then they’re going to have services from me and my team. When they graduate, we do not provide any services because it’s basically our goal. Our hope is that while they were here, and that’s either ODU Global, almost 8,000 students around the world, either they were on campus or ODU Global, that during their degree time, that they absolutely would be able to have some sort of an experience to work in an internship. So that’s what we do.
We also are the keepers of co-curricular experiences. One of the things that we immediately knew was that not every student can afford to take an internship class. Especially in some of our disciplines that do not allow pay, you can imagine the setup. So I’m going to register for 12 hours to go and work an unpaid internship, and I’m going to pay this huge bill. And that’s what currently exists in some of our disciplines, although I’d love to see that change for access. But ultimately, we’ll have students that have amazing internships, but ODU doesn’t know. So we developed through my office a co-curricular recognition. So a student can take my internship course for free, and they can receive transcript recognition so that a future employer, by looking at their transcripts, can say, “Hey.” We’ve already heard from students who have graduated to say, “I had a job interview. They wanted to make sure I had my bachelor’s, and they saw the internship. And when we got to the interview, they said, ‘It says here that you did an internship, so tell us about it.’”
So it’s already working out and think about it for data collection purposes, and trying to understand who’s doing an internship and who’s not. I’m really interested in that question, who is not here? So if we see certain groups, well, who’s not here and how do we solve that problem? So those are all the ways that we do that. So we handle the data around co-curricular internships. We work with institutional research for all the credit bearing internship courses, as well as PLA, prior learning assessment, and a program that I created when we started in ’23, and that is past internship recognition.
So again, for everybody out there who has huge student populations like we do, getting the message out, setting the alarm to say, “Hey, did you do a great internship? Come on and talk to us. Let’s get it on your transcript. Maybe you’re eligible for incentives because I have a lot of grants where maybe we could help you do another one.” So those are the types of things that we do at the Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office.
So here at ODU we have, it’s called CCLD, the Career and Leadership Development Office. That office is housing service learning, it’s housing employment programs. Here in the Commonwealth of Virginia, we have had an amazing statewide effort to increase internships, really propelled by three different governors. So there was a series of grants to convert federal work study into federal work study internships. So in that part of the house, they’re doing student employment. And if it can be converted into an internship, we work very closely together at service learning, working with different organizations on campus. And then of course they do resume rushes. They are the host of our large career and internship fair. So we work together, but we have very distinctive responsibilities.
It was really interesting because I think when our models were first introduced, people were like, “Wait a minute. Aren’t internships and career? What’s happening here?” I had someone that I had met that had been in career services for decades, and she said, “This is wonderful because the career office has so much to do. If you really want to highlight or uplift internship programs, it can’t be nested. It can’t be embedded.” So I was so delighted to hear that. And that was the thinking all along, is that you can’t give career services all of these things to do and think they’re going to do everything plus 100% more.
So I love the mantra of our office. And I tell folks all the time, people say, “The grass is greener on the other side.” And I say, “Oh no, no, no, no. The grass is greener where you water it.” And that’s what we do at Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office. We have one job, and that is to help our students get an amazing internship or other work-based learning opportunity. That is our job. We know what we’re doing because we want to help them get out there in the field and apply their learning.
Meredith Metsker:
Yeah.
Barbara Blake:
I hope that explains the difference.
Meredith Metsker:
Yeah, it does. Thank you. I think that’s helpful context. I know our listeners will kind of want to sort of place both centers in their mind, so that’s super helpful. I’m glad you mentioned that you have one focus, one goal for every ODU student to have a work-based learning experience before they graduate. You kind of touched on this a little bit, but what does that look like in practice for your office? And what do you all focus on to make that happen? Because as you mentioned, you have a lot of students from a lot of different life circumstances. So I would love to hear the secret sauce here.
Barbara Blake:
Yeah. Yeah. So you’re talking about some radical organizational change. I mean, let’s just call it for what it is. I remember one of the phrases that I used at the very beginning, and I said, “Well, folks, how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time?” So we’ve been eating the internship elephant since 2023, one bite of the time. Really, we all knew what the first bite would be. It was really something that was eloquently put by our president and our provost. And that was we have to change the culture. So it’s not, “Hey, are you going to do an internship while you’re here at ODU?” to, “When are you doing your internship here at ODU?” And that is massive. That is a massive cultural shift. Again, when we talk about who has ownership on that, I don’t have complete ownership on selling an internship to a faculty member or to a student, to an alum, to an advisory council member, that type of thing. We all do. We all have to believe in this mission and the importance of this work.
So without a doubt, and probably one of the reasons why I left my previous position and came into this new one, is that how good does this get? Follow me here. How often on a university campus can we all agree on the importance of an initiative? That everybody is like, “That sounds like a really great idea, and I’m happy to help with it”? So if we think of the idea of an internship, applied learning, obviously we know what the student gets. The students get experience, an introduction to that discipline. Do you want to do this for a living? Is this something that you really think do you need to change? Do you have to retool here or there? So, what a benefit for the student. Families love internships. I have to tell you, when we have an admissions day, I speak to way more parents than I do the students.
Meredith Metsker:
I believe it.
Barbara Blake:
Yeah, because the parents are like, “Oh, okay.” Especially if their student is interested in a program that has a required internship. So students and families love it. They need help. You need to guide them. You need to be there for them. If they say, “I don’t have a car, how can I do an internship?” you need to have solutions, you need to have resourcing. But generally speaking, they love it. Then we look at faculty, bringing experts into their classroom, really getting that value, so that students who are in their programs. And then they go on to amazing careers, what a wonderful, gratifying feeling. So faculty love it.
And then, of course, as a university community, alums, especially if they want to come back and give back, they want to host interns. They want to come into the classroom and talk about work-based learning. So ultimately, when you’re talking about a cultural change, you have to have buy-in, sincere real buy-in to say, “Yeah, this is actually, it’s a win-win-win for all of us.” And when you can do that, you’re at that moment. I’ll just really emphasize this again. If it is top-down, if you’re president, if you’re provost, if you have that top leadership that is going to say, “We need to do this, and we’re going to put money behind this too. We’re not going to ask you to do the impossible with nothing. We’re going to provide resources. We’re going to provide an office, a Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office.” We’re open Monday through Friday, 8:30 to 5:00. We don’t have remote work or telework. We are here. We are here every day. A student, anyone who comes through the door, they’re going to have service, and they’re going to know that we’re here.
We do initiatives, programming, and we always do it in different modalities. So if I have an on-campus initiative or program that I’m running, well, we’re going to have the same thing. We’re going to be accessible. So in order to have this type of change, number one, you have to have support. You have to have a plan. You have to prove your reputation, and you have to prove to everyone in the community that you are here to help. My personal philosophy, our team knows it, is do no harm. We want to help. If you don’t need our help, you don’t want our help, then that is fine. But we are here if you need us. We’re not hard to find. We answer the phones. We’re in the office every day. So you have to really prove that you are going to be behind the initiative and do the work. And that is one of the things that we have done.
Lots of hours. I can tell you that. In these first three years, I’ve had 70-hour weeks, and holidays where the university’s closed down over Christmas, but yeah, I’m working. So that cultural change, getting a lot of buy-in. As the old adage says, you want people to say your name when you’re not there. So those types of things. But then also, I would absolutely say a key component for really being able to be successful is to have the resourcing. So either your institution needs to have some resourcing, maybe it’s for unpaid internships, maybe it’s for space, maybe it’s for additional support services for students who are trying to do these things. Maybe the institution is going to sign an MOU with a major regional employer that wants 50 interns every year. Maybe it looks like that. Do you understand what I’m saying?
So there’s all of this different resourcing and these different ways, and you have to have a very big wide toolkit because it’s not always going to be the same. Remember, a lot of us, when we think about an internship, perhaps we go back to our own internship, and we think about what that looked like. So one of the things with the cultural change is we had to do a lot of institutional work. We gathered the ODU Internship Administration Council, full of senior tenure faculty, associate deans, and we needed to talk about as a community, what is work-based learning? How are we going to define that? And for the record, if you want to know, basically on our campus, a three-hour credit bearing internship was anywhere from 120 to 200 hours. So we said, we’re going to take the lower threshold, and we’re going to treat our co-curriculars that I do, the free classes, as a one credit class, but it’s free so you can’t give them one credit.
So the minimum, the absolute floor into getting recognition or services per se or benefits from grants and things is that the student has to be in the seat for at least 40 hours. So creating those definitions, creating a work-based learning inventory around campus. What are the different ways that a student can engage in work-based learning? So there was a lot of institutional work to do, which of course you cannot do without a lot of enthusiasm from others. So along with that, we needed data. So one of the first things that we did in the first six months, as we were trying to increase student internships, is we created a student internship exit survey. What we did was, and this is all living in Qualtrics by the way, what we did is we paired that new survey, that we want every student when they finish their internship or work-based learning experience to complete, was actually tracked with our student exit survey for seniors.
So that senior survey, it’s a really wonderful survey, we have a response rate of more than 95%. So we now have two sets of data. We’ve got that point data where the sophomore finishes their internship, and we collect data about their experience. This office does act if there was something that was wrong there or if there was a complaint or if it’s the best internship ever and more students should go. We act on all that data. And then, of course, maybe that sophomore is getting to senior year and is now ready to graduate. Well, we’re going to ask them again about those experiences. So we have two sets of data and additional data collection methods because it didn’t exist before.
So I think for a lot of folks who are thinking about if they could do it or what would it look like on my campus, ultimately, is there any infrastructure whatsoever or would this be a rebuild? I have an entrepreneurial heart. I looked at this from the very beginning as this is a new business. This is a new venture. We have to build it from the ground up, and we need a lot of help, and we need a lot of money. If we can get those things, then we have the opportunity to build something amazing really for the post-COVID era, and addressing Gen Z and some of those Gen Alphas coming in, and really meeting them where they’re at to show them the pathway and the pipeline for employment.
Meredith Metsker:
Yeah, that’s all super interesting. The last point you made about meeting them where they’re at, I think you kind of touched on this a little bit earlier, but there’s sort of four main pathways for work-based learning through your office. So if I’m recalling correctly, it’s four-credit internship courses, a zero-credit co-curricular internship course, their prior learning assessment, and then the prior internship recognition.
Barbara Blake:
You got it.
Meredith Metsker:
Okay.
Barbara Blake:
Great job.
Meredith Metsker:
I think you kind of touched on each of those pathways a little bit, but is there anything else you wanted to add about those pathways, why you’re focusing there?
Barbara Blake:
Well, again, if you are motivated to understand at your institution who is doing an internship and who’s not, you do have to listen to them. So having these surveys where you can collect information, and when they say, “I can’t do anything that’s off campus. I don’t have a car.” When they’re telling you your barriers, and that’s also in our strategic plan, is identifying the barriers and overcoming the barriers. So for better or for worse, when you have students that say, “This course is an elective, and it does cost me extra money, I’m not going to take an internship credit bearing course. I’m just not. I will forego that being on my transcript, and I will just go on my own, and I’ll put it on my resume, and we’ll see what happens.”
So with having the co-curricular, which for the undergraduate it’s UNIV 168 internship, and then for the graduate, it’s grad 668 graduate internship, this offers them a way to engage ODU and think about all these great data points too. So to date, over my three years, if I’m over 500 co-curricular internships that ODU knew nothing about, think about how I’m engaging those students and those employers that we did not have data for. So providing resources and really listening to your students and where they’re at, that helps you to engage them. So I would highly recommend any institution, whether it’s just your traditional career services model, but think about the ways that you can capture that portion of your student body, because you know they’re out there. You absolutely know that they’re out there, that they’re looking either for financial reasons or professional development reasons, but they’re out there. So how do you bring them back into the fold and say, “Oh my gosh, where did you go and what did you do? Well, we want to recognize that on your transcript.”
So for our credit bearing and our zero credit courses, it actually looks like a course, or zero credit is pass/fail, and there’s a handful of things that they need to do. There’s five things they have to do. And then, of course, credit bearing is A, B, C, et cetera. Now, on our past internship or prior internship recognition, it’s a transcription note. So it’s a note on their transcript that acknowledges that they had completed an internship. And of course with PLA, if they pass, they’re getting the credit on there. But one of the things that I love, because sometimes there’s some dicey things about prior learning assessment, at ODU, they actually have to pay a fee. Now, the fee is cheaper than the three-credit course, but what if it doesn’t make? What if the faculty evaluates and says, “No, this is not worth three credit hours”? Well, one of the things that my office can do is come in and say, “Hey, maybe we can get this on your transcript because this is valuable work.” Perhaps, perhaps not. But just having those resources.
I will tell you, in the feedback that we have received for our students, they feel so appreciated and seen that what they have done prior to their arrival, it matters. And we are trying to acknowledge them. One of the things that we do with all of our students is we congratulate them. Not every student can complete an internship for a variety of reasons and hardships. So the fact that they are working, the fact that they are trying to really understand the industry that they hope to go into, we want to celebrate that, and we want to lift them up to make sure that they know they’re getting the signal, you’re on the right path.
Meredith Metsker:
Awesome. Yeah, that’s super helpful to hear the specifics on what you’re doing and then why you’re doing it.
Barbara, I think that’s probably a good place to wrap up part one of our conversation. When we come back for part two, we’ll dig into your office’s biggest wins so far, what your funding strategy looks like, how you address challenges around unpaid internships, and what’s next for the office. So we’ll see you soon.
