By Maddie Mumford
Bellarmine guarantees every student the opportunity to have an internship, develop a career plan and build a professional network while at the university. According to Bellarmine’s Career Development Center, “97% of graduates are engaged in full-time opportunities in their career fields of interest and 88% of graduates participated in 90+ hours of experiential learning that includes internships.”
Senior Anne Pearson received a full-time job offer from the organization with which she interned, Free the Facts. Pearson is double majoring in political science and psychology with a minor is criminal justice.
While Pearson was interning at Free the Facts, a project she was working on extended past the internship timeframe, so her supervisor asked her to continue working for the organization. Pearson transitioned into an ambassador for Free the Facts and this role will flow into a full-time job once she graduates and moves to Washington, D.C., where the organization has its office.
As an ambassador, Pearson is in charge of getting policy experts to Bellarmine’s campus to talk to students about important topics.
“My role is to connect policy experts on these topics with college students,” Pearson said. “Some of the topics the students can learn about are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, national debt, loans and any similar topics related to economics.”
Pearson said how Bellarmine is known for being more academically challenging and she is grateful for that.
“I had some pretty awesome professors who were hard graders and very picky, but this forced me to improve my research and writing skills,” Pearson said. “Because of this, I was able to show Free the Facts my portfolio pieces, and they knew I would be able to easily transition into completing writing pieces for them.”
Bellarmine encourages and helps students create Handshake and LinkedIn accounts to connect with companies and organizations that offer internships and / or jobs.
Bellarmine senior Ben Seifferlein obtained his internship at Flix Premiere through Handshake. Flix Premiere is a streaming service for independent movies.
“When I found an internship that interested me, I contacted Lauren Coffey in the Career Development Center, and she was a lot of help,” Seifferlein said. “She helped me update my resume and set up a meeting with Flix Premiere.”
“My job at Flix Premiere is to watch unreleased films and analyze them,” Seifferlein said. “I analyze them by writing a brief synopsis of the film, define the demographic and who the film will appeal to, label warnings if there are any triggers in the film and make note of any notable actors in the film.”
Each Friday, Seifferlein and his co-workers hold a conference call to discuss the various films that they have watched and analyzed the previous week.
Seifferlein has been working remotely from Louisville because he is still in school but said he hopes to continue working at Flix Premiere after graduation and be able to move to Beverly Hills where the company is based.
Hayley Piazza, a 2019 Bellarmine graduate, had multiple internships while in school but her last one turned into a career.
Piazza interned for and now works at Brown-Forman Corporation. Brown-Forman is a spirits and wine company that manufactures, distills, bottles, imports, exports, markets and sells a range of beverage alcohol products.
“While I was interning at Brown-Forman for marketing, I did a variety of tasks and jobs,” Piazza said. “I helped with special marketing events, wrote social audits, assisted in creative deigns and campaigns, edited posts for our website and more.”
The position Piazza held as an intern luckily became available as a full-time job, and her supervisor at Brown-Forman encouraged Piazza to apply for the job.
“I went through the full hiring process the same way anyone else did, and I interviewed against other people for the position,” Piazza said. “But it was helpful that I was already on the Brown-Forman team as an intern, so they knew me and trusted my work.
“Bellarmine requiring internships for my major definitely helped me get my new job, and I am so grateful for that,” she said.
Each interviewee said grammar and editing was the course that most assisted them with their internship. Because of this course is crucial and important to almost any career. The interviewees also said the Career Development Center was helpful in helping them obtain internships.
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