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January 13, 2023
Sacramento State Communication Research college students want sensible expertise. Sacramento’s ladies entrepreneurs need assistance getting their concepts off the bottom.
Pairing the 2 made excellent sense to Cheng Hong, an assistant professor of Communication Studies whose analysis pursuits embody serving to organizations talk their values to stakeholders.
“I am doing analysis about it, after which I noticed, possibly I might additionally get college students concerned by internship packages,” stated Hong, who can be a faculty-in-residence at Sac State’s Carlsen Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. “It is all sort of linked. It is all sort of cohesive.”
She labored with FourthWave, a company that helps women-led Sacramento companies and Carlsen Middle companion, to pair six college students with seven native startup corporations for paid internships that supplied them with helpful, career-ready expertise.
A Sac State Anchor College Grant funded the internships. The grants are awarded to college students, college, and workers working locally to advance Sac State’s Anchor University initiative.
“We’re primarily based in our group,” Hong stated. “We are attempting to attach our college students with the group, with the Sacramento space, the entrepreneurship ecosystem. So, I believe that is consistent with what Anchor College is about.”
The undertaking additionally connects with Sac State’s mission to be an antiracist and inclusive campus, she stated.
“Anchor College values range, fairness, and inclusion, and I believe that is naturally a part of this system, as a result of we’re specializing in empowering feminine founders,” Hong stated.
College students carried out quite a lot of public relations and communications duties, together with writing press releases and media pitches, in addition to creating social media content material calendars.
Destinee Lang, a senior Journalism main graduating this spring, interned with ladies’s well being web site Pink Lemonade and medical startup Scopi.
For Pink Lemonade, she constructed a social media calendar primarily based on the location’s present and deliberate content material. That work, she stated, allowed her to faucet into her present skillset. She runs a well-liked TikTok account providing ideas for pure hair.
Her work for Scopi targeted extra on writing, an space wherein she acknowledges some weak point. The internship allowed her to observe and shore up these expertise.
“Having the ability to truly work with Sac State took a number of the burden off of us to attempt to do a number of the preliminary work, and it additionally paired us with college students that truly had been focused on what we had been doing.” — Lilly Khorsand, Pink Lemonade co-founder
This system, she stated, “helped me learn to talk higher in knowledgeable setting. With out this internship, I felt I might have been misplaced leaping after faculty into the workforce.”
Lang stated the chance to work particularly with ladies entrepreneurs is a major cause she was so keen to use for the internship. Particularly, she stated, Pink Lemonade gives frank and sincere details about ladies’s well being points, a subject that may typically be troublesome even for ladies to debate.
“I’ve by no means heard of an organization that desires to empower ladies on this manner,” she stated. “I simply really feel prefer it was an awesome course of that I might like to see different ladies and males take part in as nicely.”
The partnership with Sac State solved a number of challenges for Pink Lemonade co-founders Lilly Khorsand and Gaby Chavez. The model new firm – launched in July 2022 – desperately wanted assist selling its model. Khorsand and Chavez had been focused on hiring an intern however didn’t know the way, and even when they discovered that particular person, they had been unsure how they’d pay for that work.
Sac State linked them with – and compensated – Lang, an enthusiastic intern who was prepared and prepared to assist. That basis allowed them to deal with ensuring Lang could be handled pretty and will carry out significant work.
“Having the ability to truly work with Sac State took a number of the burden off of us to attempt to do a number of the preliminary work, and it additionally paired us with college students that truly had been focused on what we had been doing,” Khorsand stated. “They had been getting paid, so it sort of allowed us to focus extra on the connection we constructed with Destinee.”
With some cash from the Anchor Grant nonetheless accessible, Hong stated she hopes to have the ability to rent at the least one or two college students this spring. Past that, she plans to use for extra funding to proceed the partnership, with the objective to create a sustainable long-term internship program.
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