Ashley Strausser joined the Otterbein staff four weeks ago as the associate director for the Center of Career Planning, a title that was created upon her employment. Strausser comes to Otterbein with experience working at Denison University and Ohio State University. With this experience, Strausser said she was able to “build a program from the ground up.”

With the help of Ryan Brechbill, director of the Center of Career Planning, the two are trying to promote the office to help students become more aware of the services and resources available to them.

What do you do as internship coordinator?

My role, not unlike Ryan’s within the office, is to meet with students, really around all kinds of facets and aspects of career development … (I do) a lot of general career counseling stuff, but also obviously assisting students with their internship search, their job search, if they’re thinking about graduate school, resume and cover letter development (and) we do practice interviews.

It kind of spans the spectrum in terms of what the day-to-day really looks like. As far as the internship coordinator piece, there has never been anyone at Otterbein kind of dedicated to this, so really what I’m trying to do right now is to get a sense of how things are working.

What we’re really trying to figure out is how we can share opportunities broadly with our students and how we can create a centralized process for doing that.

(We’re) really trying to ensure that our students are completely taking advantage of these opportunities so that they’re as competitive as possible and as prepared as possible … when you gain that practical experience, one, it’s going to give you a sense of “Is this something I really want to do?” and two, “I really loved this and I want to move forward, so now I have professional experience … to be more marketable.” It’s getting that real-world experience putting theory to practice, all of those types of things.

We’re really about student success and utilizing the internship program as one of the avenues to help ensure that success.

What are the perks of doing an internship?

I think they’re critical. First and foremost, I think it’s that “Is this a good fit for me?” It gives students the ability to try on a career with no strings attached. “If I love it, great. I had that experience; I’m making an informed decision,” whereas, “If it’s not a good fit for me, it’s still a great experience, I can put that experience on my resume and I need to try something else.” The opportunities are vast. (It’s) really an opportunity to go out and make an informed decision, put theory to practice.

With the state of our economy and the competitiveness, the more experience that you have, the more competitive you’re going to look to an employer. It’s to give you the advantage. For the students that do need credit, it’s a way to gain practical experience and earn credit at the same time. If it’s a paid internship, it’s an opportunity to, hopefully, get some money.

It’s a great way to get a foot in the door of an organization. If you’re thinking, “This is the organization that I would like to work at after graduation,” many organizations will hire from their internship pool, and so “If I can get in and impress them in 10 weeks, the greater chance that I might get an offer. If I’m not a senior, I might get the offer to come back next summer and intern with them again.” Which again only increases the opportunity to get an offer your senior year, so there’s a lot. In my opinion, there aren’t good reasons not to do it.

How can you help students who don’t have a clear vision for career paths find internships?

What we would try to do is identify or help them narrow down where their interests lie. We have a great online assessment and it’s called Focus, so we might start with Focus and what it will do is ask them questions about their interests, their skills, their values, their morals, how they enjoy spending leisure time, and then it’s going to give them a list of occupations that might be a good fit.

Typically, what I’d say is to take Focus, and then if you can bring five or seven ideas that sound interesting the next time we meet, and then let’s try to prioritize them. We might look at your top three and try to do an informational interview. Maybe do a morning or afternoon shadowing experience to try to help you narrow it down a little bit more. We want to obviously help them identify an internship that is going to be interesting.

Being willing and being engaged to staying in that process and trying out different internships. Maybe we’ll meet two or three times to hone in on that as opposed to the student that comes in and knows he wants to do a marketing internship … Both are really great types of students to work with.