Virtual Internships Take Off at Embry-Riddle

Mahteme Desta, a senior at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, was sprinting toward graduation when the pandemic struck. With stay-at-home orders and strict social distancing guidelines in place, his career quest could have been derailed, but Embry-Riddle has been working with industry partners to launch virtual internships, especially for seniors like Desta.

Mahteme Desta, a senior at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

On May 22, Desta will begin his virtual internship with aleading aircraft manufacturer. The company is shipping equipment to him so thathe can take part in virtual meetings, presentations and other businessactivities. Through the internship, he hopes to deepen his engineering andbusiness skills. “My long-term goal is to help advance the aerospace industryin Africa,” said Desta, a native of Ethiopia who currently lives in DaytonaBeach, Florida.

The virtual internship opportunity sprang from Desta’sservice as a flight engineering intern for the same company last summer.

Embry-Riddle President P. Barry Butler said the universityis actively seeking industry partners to support as many virtual careeropportunities for students as possible. “As businesses and individuals work tofind their new normal, we’re seeing a number of innovative, technology-basedsolutions for maintaining a robust talent pool across the aviation andaerospace industries,” Butler said. “At Embry-Riddle, we want to help ourstudents build meaningful careers and promote workforce capacity for ourindustry partners.”

As the novel 2019 coronavirus crisis erupted, Embry-Riddle’sresidential campuses in Florida and Arizona quickly shifted classes as well asa wide array of student services online. In addition to virtual tutoring,counseling and fitness offered by various departments, “Embry-Riddle’s CareerServices team has been offering online panels, webinars, competitions andprograms with top employers – from manufacturers and airlines, to governmentagencies,” said Alicia M. Smyth, executive director of Career Services on theDaytona Beach Campus.

The Student Affairs team at Embry-Riddle is promoting acompetition for prizes for students who take part in Eagle Elevate, a digitalcareer development program that gamifies career skill-building to help studentsstand out in a competitive job market, she noted. A new weekly Instagram videowas launched, featuring career tips, and Embry-Riddle is offering virtualone-on-one career advising, resumé reviews, mock interviews, LinkedIn profilereviews, internship and job search assistance as well as help with salarynegotiation, Smyth reported. Students have access to online resources such asHandshake, GoinGlobal, CareerShift, Big Interview and CareerSpots videos forstudents at all of Embry-Riddle’s campuses.

“We are having live virtual seminars for individual degreeareas on such topics as internship for credit and hot job leads coinciding withour one-on-one outreach to every May graduate,” said Kevin L. Hewerdine,executive director of Career Services & Corporate Relations onEmbry-Riddle’s campus in Prescott, Arizona.

Most recently, the deans of Embry-Riddle’s three Colleges ofAviation at Prescott, Daytona Beach and the Worldwide Campus have teamed up toorganize a virtual panel for students, focusing on the resiliency of aviationand featuring industry executives.

To date, 814 students have taken advantage of virtualtutoring services on Tutor.com since April 17, with the most popular subjectbeing Calculus 1. Some 95 percent of survey respondents said they were happythat Embry-Riddle made the Tutor.com service available to them, reported TerryDallas, executive director of IT Services.

In addition, during the same timeframe, nearly 6,000Embry-Riddle Zoom classes and other sessions serving more than 61,000participants have happened, she added.

Faculty have been leveraging Zoom’s interactive featuressuch as instant polling and virtual breakout rooms to enliven online classesand keep students engaged. Amid the health crisis, faculty have used Zoom andother platforms to communicate across all three campuses and with universityleadership, who recently took part in an EagleVision Faculty Senate meeting.

“Embry-Riddle’s Zoom service was carefully configured toprevent commonly reported security issues,” said Vice President and ChiefInformation Officer Becky Vasquez. “For added security, best practices are inplace for all users. Those guidelines call on all Embry-Riddle Zoom users toavoid publishing meeting links on public sites, require passwords for meetingsand use the waiting room feature.”