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Students at Champlain College can participate in experiential learning with local entrepreneurs, thanks to a partnership with a local co-working and innovation space.
Champlain College
About four in 10 college students believe developing specific skills needed for their career is among the most important outcomes to them in their academic experience, according to a winter 2023 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse. However, 22 percent of all respondents indicated they had never participated in experiential learning or an internship.
Champlain College in Vermont partnered with a local coworking campus and business incubator, Hula, in 2023 to build a talent pipeline for local businesses and expose students to new and maybe unfamiliar career opportunities.
Over the past two years, the partnership has resulted in real-life case studies and client-facing work for students and faculty, as well as greater engagement with young talent for employers.
What’s the need: “One thing that’s very apparent in Vermont is we need young talent,” says Angelika Koukoulas, Champlain’s Innovation Hub Project Manager, who oversees the Hula-Champlain partnership.
Vermont experiences the worst brain drain in the country, losing 57.5 percent of its college graduates, many of whom move to Massachusetts or New York, according to 2022 data analysis.
Koukoulas’s role is to help students identify work experiences in Vermont and build relationships with employers to fill holes in their workforces.
“They need more hands, they need big ideas, they need students who are excited about their work and are willing to put in effort to learn,” Koukoulas says.
There’s also a national shortage of internship opportunities, one that is tied to a mismatch in employer needs and student interests. The partnership addresses both comprehensively by weighing all stakeholders’ interests.
How it works: Hula is about a mile away from Champlain College and just down the road from the college’s Miller Center campus.
The coworking space supports 60 member businesses and up to 600 coworking individuals. The businesses belong to a variety of industries, including green technology and marketing, as well as traditional business or finance roles.
A majority of the collaborations fall into two camps: companies providing projects for capstone-like courses for experiential learning or companies creating internships for students.
Inquiries can come directly from faculty members looking to revamp curriculum or offer real-world scenarios for students to engage their skills or from employers who have a specific need and want young talent to assist them. Often, start-ups are looking for student support for social media or blog-writing campaigns, but there’s also a need for general business admin or accounting support, Koukoulas says.
For internships, Koukoulas will serve as a recruiter of sorts for the company partner, assisting them in creating the job description and posting it on Handshake and also encouraging students she believes would be a good fit to apply and increasing the number of applicants for the business partner.
“It widens their candidate pool and hopefully gets more students opportunities that they wouldn’t have even thought of otherwise,” Koukoulas says.
All projects have been pro-bono, so the company invests zero dollars to enlist a class for work, but almost all internships have been paid roles.
What’s different: Hula serves both as a business partner, hiring interns and supporting class projects, but also as an incubator for small businesses in Vermont.
The people who work on Hula’s campus rotate, meaning there’s continual variety of the types of industries or groups students could partner with. The climate of the office building also means businesses are innovation and creatively minded, making partnership more natural.
Koukoulas has an office at Hula, meaning she can directly engage in communal spaces or in building channels to solicit employer partnerships.
Vermont also has a very relational culture, something Koukoulas has had to navigate as a more recent resident to the Green Mountain State, whether the relationships are with faculty—who have taught a course for a long time and may be hesitant to make changes—or with businesses leaders, who consider their start-up to be their baby and may be uncomfortable letting a student participate in their work.
There’s an educational piece to the puzzle, both helping faculty identify their ask for project and employers create meaningful internships for learners. Koukoulas hosted an Internship 101 workshop for Hula businesses to set expectations for internships and provide guidance on best practices, such as providing students a mentor. She also hosts regular lunch for interns who work within the Hula offices to check in and provide support as needed.
The impact: Since the partnership launched in summer 2023, 90 students have engaged in a Hula-based project within a course, and 18 students have participated in an internship.
The partnership is in its early stages, so Champlain doesn’t have data on how students have translated their work with the start-ups into longer-term career development, but exposure to new careers and experiential learning are two benefits Koukoulas is eager to see manifest.
“I can’t wait to see if it works; I can’t wait to see the fruit of that labor in the next couple of years,” Koukoulas says.
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