Interns and businesses adjust to virtual, canceled summer programs
For many college students, summertime isn’t all about fun in the sun. It’s a time for gaining professional experience through internships outside the university setting.
In light of the coronavirus pandemic, though, this year’s summer internships aren’t quite what some students expected.
Steven Mugleston, a senior at Utah State University, landed in Topeka for the summer to complete an internship with local utility Evergy.
Mugleston had to relocate to the capital city because Evergy can’t hire paid interns outside of Kansas and Missouri, the two states in which the company operates, due to legal implications.
Mugleston didn’t mind making the move, but due to COVID-19, he has been doing much of his work remotely from his Topeka apartment.
“It’s been really interesting,” Mugleston said. “I got here at the place I’m staying. First day, I showed up to the office. They handed me a computer and sent me back home. All of my meetings for the most part have been through Microsoft Teams.”
Mugleston’s program at Utah State requires each student to complete an internship prior to graduation — like many schools across the country.
The college senior is majoring in technology systems, with a minor in drone aviation, and he plans to graduate in December.
Through his work with Evergy, Mugleston said he is getting first-hand experience with drone aviation, which does allow him limited interaction with others.
“There are days where I’ll go out and do an inspection or a mapping,” he said. “I’ll still work with people there. We take proper precautions to stay safe and social distance. So I do get to have some interaction outside of my apartment. It’s not quite what I was expecting, but it’s been a really cool experience.”
According to Evergy recruiters Katie Gillespie and Kolby Kauffman, the company has 82 interns in this summer’s internship class, which is close to normal.
Kauffman said the utility started recruiting interns during the fall 2019 semester, so the recruiting process wasn’t greatly affected by coronavirus concerns.
“We were almost to the finish line when the COVID-19 pandemic started,” Kauffman said. “We recruited in the fall and filled the majority of our class. Then, we went to the colleges during the spring recruiting season. The only way we were really affected was we had to move our in-person interviews for a few of the interns to virtual.”
Then in April, Evergy started to see the “the writing on the wall,” Kauffman said. Around the time stay-at-home orders were being issued, she and Gillespie had to start seriously considering what the company would do if interns weren’t able to show up in person.
“That was kind of the signal that we were going to have to make changes,” Kauffman said. “We started making a plan and had mile posts to essentially say, ‘Hey if we’re not back to work by this point, we’re going to have to decide to go completely virtual.’”
And that’s exactly what the company did.
Evergy’s interns fall into three main categories — business, information technology and engineering.
Gillespie said some interns do still go into an office or visit a work-site on occasion because of the nature of their work, but all of the programming she and Kauffman have organized takes place online.
“In the past, the summer consisted of a ton of different events that we put on,” Gillespie said.
Those events included tours of Evergy’s facilities, in-person trainings, volunteer sessions and intern presentations at the end of the summer in front of Evergy executives and hiring managers.
“We kind of looked at our playbook from in-person internship programming and figured out how we could make that virtual,” Kauffman said. “Our tours we’re doing virtual. ... Even though they won’t be there, they’ll get some live footage to kind of understand what they’re looking at, so that they can see what a circuit breaker looks like in real life instead of just on a PowerPoint image.”
The aspect of an in-person internship that has been more challenging to replicate is facilitating organic interaction among interns.
“We typically have hour-and-a-half car rides going to a power plant where interns can all hang out together and chat and get to know each other that way,” Gillespie said. “Those are the pieces of our program that we’ll really miss this summer.”
To combat that challenge, Gillespie and Kauffman have tried to be more intentional about getting interns to connect with one another. One way they have done that is by splitting interns into small groups of five to seven people. Those groups meet weekly to discuss a variety of topics.
“Throughout the summer we’ll have them talk about our virtual tours and what they’ve learned from those. We’ll have them debrief on some different leadership trainings that we’re wanting to conduct. We’ll do our feedback sessions in those groups. We’ll do their intern presentations in those groups,” Gillespie said. “So they’ll really get to know that core group of interns.”
Gillespie and Kauffman hand selected the groups so interns would have the opportunity to interact with a diverse cohort. Individuals in a group are likely to be working different jobs in the company and come from different universities and geographic regions.
Mugleston sees those small groups as a benefit.
“It’s been really cool, because I think I’m working with interns that I don’t think I would have met if we were in a regular office setting,” he said. “They’re at different campuses that I wouldn’t normally be at with the job position I have. So it’s cool to interact with them virtually because I still get to learn about them and the experiences they’re having.”
Gillespie, a former Evergy intern herself, said she is glad things have worked out so far because she recognizes the value of that professional experience.
“I’m just excited in general that we are able to provide a program,” she said. “I know for a lot of companies it wasn’t feasible for them to put anything on for this summer with everything going on.”
Kim Konecny, co-chair of Topeka’s TopCity Interns program, said the number of interns registered for the program this year is about half of what was expected prior to COVID-19.
The TopCity Interns planning committee, she added, has forged ahead with a slimmed down, mostly virtual version of the program for those 85 interns currently registered.
The slimmed down version of the program includes three events — a welcome event at the Topeka Zoo on June 16, a virtual panel hosted by Advisors Excel later this month and a virtual lunch and learn hosted by Clayton Wealth Partners in early July.
Konecny said some of the usual companies who encourage their interns to participate in the TopCity Interns program are still doing so. However, others who would normally be very active in the program — like Advisors Excel, Topeka’s Fellowship Bible Church and some small businesses — chose not to have interns this year.
Jeremy Wynne, outreach pastor at Fellowship Bible Church, said the church has had an internship program for about seven years and has been participating in the Top City Interns program for about three or four years.
The church typically welcomes 12 interns on board each year to gain leadership experience in ministry and discipleship. Wynne said the church had to make the decision in March to not hire interns this summer.
“We at that time still didn’t know what our summer budget was going to look like,” Wynne said “We didn’t know what our ability to be gathering was going to look like, even just what our workflow was going to look like.”
He said they had already started receiving applications and were eager to hire, but they had to make the decision early on to ditch those plans so that potential interns would be free to search for other positions.
“It was really sad and disappointing,” Wynne said. “We had a great group of applicants and a great group of people we were really excited to be able to spend time with and develop over the course of the summer and live life with. ... But we really wanted to be able to allow people to have the opportunity to earn money and have a sure thing.”
Wynne said there has definitely been a loss this summer. He and others, though, are still looking forward to opportunities ahead.
Mugleston said he discovered Evergy’s internship online when he was searching for summer possibilities late last year. He considers himself lucky and “extremely grateful” to have gotten the internship — because many businesses told him they were no longer hiring summer interns due to the pandemic.
“Overall, I was not expecting any of this to happen the way that it did,” he said, “but I’m kind of grateful in a way, counting my blessings, for how it’s turned out and how it’s working.”