Joachim Bald is Co-Director of the Oregon International Internship Program for the Oregon University System. He worked for Commerzbank AG, Frankfurt, Germany, from 1990 to 1995 and last served as Assistant Area Manager for the former Soviet Union. Joachim is a Certified Management Accountant and holds a graduate degree in Business from the University of Dortmund, Germany. In 1995 he received a Doctorate from the School of Economics and Business Administration at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany, with a dissertation on the economic transition process in Russia.

Jack Van de Water is Dean of International Programs at Oregon State University and Assistant Vice Chancellor for International Programs of the Oregon University System. He has served as President of the Association of International Education Administrators, received two Fulbright awards, and was an American Council on Education Fellow in Academic Administration. Van de Water completed his graduate degrees in International Relations and Comparative and International Education at Syracuse University after finishing undergraduate studies at St. Lawrence University.

A comprehensive international outreach agenda should include a systematic effort at developing international internship opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students. Overseas internships provide the international competence that is essential for career advancement in the global economy. In order to develop internship placements, universities must forge partnerships with domestic and international employers that challenge the traditional international university linkages.

U.S. colleges and universities face an ever more rapidly changing environment that challenges the traditional roles of many institutions. In fact, it is already evident that we are engaged in a process of reclaiming our relevance to our states, our stakeholders and ourselves. This process is taking place in a new context, one that has seldom been a primary concern of U.S. higher education. The context is global.

In "Educating for Global Competence" the American Council on Education very clearly identified globalization as one the foremost challenges facing higher education today:

It is not just the global marketplace that dictates change. The global context for U.S. universities reaching out to partners around the world has many dimensions. Today, knowledge is generated on a world-wide basis as faculty members collaborate with colleagues in their academic disciplines around the world. The mobility of knowledge and new ideas has removed any pretense of boundaries for learning. We are now preparing students for borderless careers by providing them access to information and educational opportunities that transcend geographical and cultural boundaries.

The challenge to keep pace with the rate of change in the global environment is the focus of this article. We will describe one particular recent initiative of the Oregon University System designed to address this challenge and present some of the lessons learned.

Global Graduates - the Oregon International Internship Program – is a cooperative education program aiming to equip students with the international experience that is quickly becoming the price of entry into the global job market.

Cooperative Education programs are an excellent way to get graduates hired and to collect valuable employer feedback that helps to keep the academic curriculum aligned with the requirements of the workplace. Global Graduates strives to take the cooperative education concept further by combining professional experience with international competence. An internship overseas offers a capstone experience that builds on the study of foreign languages on campus, the internationalization of the curriculum and the "traditional" study abroad programs. In the following, we try to summarize our experience with establishing a large network of worldwide internship opportunities that span the full spectrum of academic disciplines.

With generous seed money provided under the defense conversion act, the Oregon University System was in the fortunate position to plan big and establish a professionally staffed statewide internship infrastructure. In less than three years, Global Graduates developed an inventory of over 150 internship sites throughout Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa and has to date placed 450 students in individually arranged work assignments. These placements cover the full range of academic programs and include internships as diverse as sampling tree species in the Brazilian rain forest, organizing the world handball championship tournament in Japan and teaching social science at a German vocational training school.

Thanks to the important federal investment in the initiative, Global Graduates has been able to not only arrange the placements but also to provide substantial scholarship grants as a supplement to regular financial aid and the stipends offered by the employer. To date, these scholarship grants amount to a total of nearly $ 1.3 million.

Unfortunately, we have no ready answer to the most common question asked by colleagues in the field, which is, of course: where can we get that kind of money? Clearly, the favorable circumstances that led to the award of the federal start-up capital will not easily be duplicated elsewhere. In fact, now that the funding for the initial four years of the program is nearing its end, it becomes clear that the only sustainable fiscal basis is an equitable sharing of the costs among the constituents who benefit from this activity. More specifically, this involves a substantial personal investment from the student, a commitment of resources from regular university budgets, as well as stipends or in-kind support for the interns from the host organizations that employ their services.

The good news is that you do not have to have millions in resources to begin such an internship effort. By concentrating initially on one geographic area and a limited number of academic disciplines one can do with fewer than the three full-time internship scouts employed by Global Graduates. However, without at least one full-time administrator it will be difficult to get an international internship program off the ground. The complexity of work permits and immigration regulations alone is frustrating enough to make any half-hearted attempt at international internships fail.

The benefits of an international work experience for the student are obvious. A challenging assignment overseas provides an important opportunity to hone professional skills and offers a rewarding cross-cultural experience. Foreign language proficiency generally improves dramatically when the intern is immersed in a non-English speaking environment. Most students are also able to establish valuable professional contacts that enhance their employment prospects back home.

From the perspective of the overseas employers, it is often a special business interest in the United States and the Pacific Northwest region that justifies their participation. Many see the internship as a way to establish valuable links with future American leaders in their industry. The presence of a US intern also helps to improve the English language skills of the local employees and offers an opportunity to benefit from a fresh perspective on the organization’s activities. While an internship always represents a substantial investment in training and mentorship, most employers are able to derive an immediate tangible benefit from the carefully designed internship project itself.

For the Oregon University System, the existence of such a high-profile capstone program has become an important argument in student recruitment and retention. The program is also regularly cited as evidence for the system’s effort to be more responsive to the human resource needs of the globalizing business community in Oregon. Moreover, Global Graduates has had a measurable impact on the way students throughout the state view the quality of the public university system as a whole.

Unfortunately, although the benefits to the employer are real, they are not quite as obvious as those that accrue to the students and the university. This explains why overseas businesses are not beating down our doors to look for interns. Placing students in international assignments is a major marketing effort that draws on resources throughout the entire university community.

The obvious places to start in reaching out to potential internship providers are existing international connections that can be leveraged to yield exclusive opportunities for the students of your university. Such linkages include:

- faculty research and consulting activities overseas,

- foreign born faculty with ties to businesses in their home country,

- international alumni,

- study abroad programs and exchange agreements and

- American university staff stationed overseas.

In our experience, most faculty and alumni are eager to help and feel honored to assist in this effort. We offer small grants for travel and telecommunication expenses to contributing faculty and find these to be extremely cost effective.

An alternative approach to developing internship sites that deserves serious consideration consists of reciprocal agreements with partner universities overseas. Here, the outreach to international employers would be left to the partner institution, while the U.S. university in return commits to placing foreign students in internships at home. This approach is appealing because the partners focus on their respective strengths and mobilize their existing cooperative programs to the mutual benefit of their students at little incremental cost.

As we examined the reciprocal option more closely, we realized that our existing partner universities actually have a limited capacity to place students in internships. Most of our partners traditionally follow a less advising-intensive university model, where students rely on their individual efforts to find internships. There are indeed institutions of higher education in most of the target countries with more of an application-oriented training mission and those generally have excellent links with local employers. Politically however, cooperating with these institutions would have alienated the traditional university partners, who in terms of compatibility of academic programs are still considered to provide the better overall match for the Oregon University System.

Regardless of who the foreign university partner would be, using a local intermediary in placing interns will always mean a significant loss of control over the quality and relevance of the internship assignment. Most likely the intermediary will impose an additional set of rules and deadlines, which risks making the framework for arranging an internship so complex that few candidates will actually prevail.

At the same time, we had serious doubts as to our own capability to pre-arrange internships in Oregon for foreign candidates simply on the basis of their paper files. Given the fierce bottom-line mentality of American business, we found little willingness to invest in candidates who are not eligible for permanent employment in the US, most certainly not without a prior personal interview. Thus, our conclusion was to try to "sell" Oregon interns directly to employers overseas.

In addition to leveraging existing international faculty and alumni contacts, we also made a great number of cold calls in areas where we saw student demand but had little existing links to offer. The success rate here was less than 20%, as we struggled with the typical "Now, where is Oregon again?" and "Why should we hire someone from Oregon, if we have all these local students besieging us for summer jobs?"

Ideally, we would have liked to build more internships by mobilizing domestic contacts that have international affiliations, such as foreign subsidiaries and joint ventures or state agencies with overseas offices. Riding piggyback with Oregon’s international trade flows would have accentuated the economic development dimension of the internship program and would automatically keep the program priorities aligned with Oregon’s role in the global economy. Involving more Oregon employers in the internship development would provide an ideal basis for leveraging financial support for the interns and for lobbying the state legislature for sustainable funding.

Although there have been some individual successes, the overall record in regard to the cooperation with Oregon employers has been disappointing. The tight fiscal restraints in social service and government agencies generally do not allow any cost sharing, while private sector employers tend to focus exclusively on cooperative programs that serve the immediate objective of hiring deficit talent in technical areas. Despite the globalization rhetoric, broader international approaches are simply not a priority.

In general, the expectations of host organizations towards American interns are very high. Almost everywhere in the world, students are keenly pursuing opportunities to study or work in the United States and the limited number of such openings is typically awarded in a rigorous selection process. This explains why employers routinely expect elite credentials from American candidates for an internship in their own organization. A candidate profile typically calls for a combination of fluency in the local language and advanced industry specific skills on a level that can rarely be met by U.S. students in the undergraduate divisions.

Selling undergraduate students to overseas employers who have free pick of highly qualified local students is a challenge. It is possible, however, when you emphasize those valuable qualities where our undergraduate students shine by international comparison. Most overseas counterparts will readily concede that they have much to learn from U.S. students in terms of computer skills, customer service attitude and a positive "can-do" approach to work.

But where do you find these highly achieving students with advanced foreign language skills and how do you motivate them to invest in an international experience while their looming financial aid loans tell them to finish up quickly and get a job? To the surprise of our university colleagues overseas, an international internship program does indeed require active student marketing. For that purpose, we funded a Campus Coordinator at every member university to identify potential interns, interview candidates, network with faculty and supervise the academic component of the internship.

In evaluating a candidate, we attempt to stress not just academic achievement but the entire qualification profile including life experiences, interpersonal skills and employment history. This is done with the objective of providing the best overall fit with the internship assignment and the organizational culture of the employer.

Despite the emphasis that our foreign partners generally place on the "hard" credentials, in our experience it is an extremely rare case that a student would be terminated or receive negative evaluations because of lacking job-specific skills. In almost all instances, the failures can be attributed to inappropriate behavior and to a lack of intercultural sensitivity.

For this reason, we began to supplement the selection process with an increasingly elaborate orientation procedure that stresses not the logistics of how to get there and where to change money, but the basic skills of how to successfully adapt to a foreign culture and how to navigate the minefield of cultural expectations. All participants are required to attend a three day orientation seminar at a retreat facility to work on their intercultural communication skills with a team of contracted trainers. Although many of our interns balk at the "touchy-feely" nature of this experiential learning approach, it is indeed the fuzzy personal undercurrents that almost always determine the success of an internship project.

Talking about success factors such as selection and orientation inevitably raises the question of what exactly constitutes a successful internship. Is it enough to justify the investment in our program by pointing out that 450 students went on internships overseas, all came back alive and only a handful were terminated early? A program of the scope of Global Graduates must report back to its constituents - students, employers and the university community - in a very clear framework of accountability.

From the beginning, we defined a set of objectives and measurable indicators designed to capture the value added to the participating students’ education, the benefits derived by the employer and the impact of the program in terms of the public image of the Oregon University System as a whole. The inputs for this systematic program assessment are compiled from a great number of sources, including the student’s application dossier and internship report, the formal interview, behavioral observations at the orientation retreat and during the internship as well as the formal employer evaluation and informal feedback from the host organization.

Now that more and more graduates of the program are beginning their professional career, we have also begun to track the long-term career impact of their international experience via an alumni newsletter and a periodic alumni questionnaire. With the wealth of data generated by this assessment activity, we feel confident that we can demonstrate that this form of international outreach is indeed worth the investment.

An international internship program should be part of any comprehensive international outreach agenda. By definition, internships are a student-centered activity. They deliver tangible benefits to student stakeholders and provide the international competence that has become essential for a successful career in any profession. At the same time, marketing our students to employers overseas forces us to move beyond our traditional university contacts and define our role in the global market place.