PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Last spring, junior David Lu won the Brown Entrepreneurship Program’s Innovation Dojo pitch competition. His winning innovation? H2OK, a prototype he’d made for a small lens that attaches to a phone camera and, with the help of an app, can determine which bacteria are in water.
Lu, a chemistry and computer science dual concentrator, knew it would be important to learn more about the business side of water supply if he wanted to successfully market his prize-winning idea.
“I wanted to see how the water industry worked,“ he said. “I wanted a practical view of how it operated that I really can’t get in the classroom.”
An opportunity to do just that presented itself over this month’s winter break in the form of a Careers in the Common Good Winternship, an intensive two-week internship experience organized by Brown’s CareerLAB. Lu interned at Valor Water Analytics, a San Francisco-based technology company that helps water utilities improve financial and environmental sustainability. In addition to analyzing data to discover how water quality impacts the accuracy of water meter readings, he attended some business meetings, interacted with colleagues and more.
Brown’s Winternship program facilitates professional opportunities at social enterprise and nonprofit organizations in Boston, New York City, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., for two weeks over winter break. Students gain hands-on experience working with organizations and companies while building professional skills by completing tangible projects. All interns are awarded a stipend of $350 to assist with food and travel expenses. This year, 49 students participated in the program, which ran from Jan. 7 to 18.
These mini-internships offer students the opportunity to explore a field without committing to an entire summer internship, says Gregory Seiler, a CareerLAB assistant director who oversees the program.
“In just two weeks, students are able to learn more about an industry, build professional connections and make a meaningful contribution to an organization," Seiler said.
Sophomore Mariel Jackson was able to immediately dive into high-level work during her Winternship at Kinvolved, a New York City nonprofit devoted to increasing attendance in the city’s public schools. She worked closely with the organization’s marketing and web teams on a user-experience research project that will ultimately inform the nonprofit’s website redesign.
The project was fast paced and intense, says Jackson, and the reward was seeing the immediate impact that her work had at Kinvolved.
“Even in two short weeks, I was able to achieve quite a bit,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting the amount of responsibility I was given, and being able to hit the ground running and collaborate with the CEO was really great.”
For senior political science concentrator Priyanka Shetty, a Winternship in Boston gave her a new perspective on nonprofit work. Though Shetty had volunteered at organizations like the Refugee Dream Center and Clinica Esperanza in Providence, she had always worked directly with those organization’s clients. She didn’t have any experience on the administrative side of a nonprofit.
At Social Innovation Forum, an organization that provides capacity building for nonprofits and helps connect them to funders, Shetty worked with the development department, writing grants and assisting with donor relations. Working in fundraising, she says, enabled her to quickly get up to speed on the organization — and learn more about how nonprofits operate in general.
“I have a more holistic picture now of how people get involved in nonprofits,” Shetty said. “It was a great learning experience.”
Though their Winternships were brief, Lu, Jackson and Shetty all say they will be able to apply the lessons learned to their work and studies at Brown and beyond. Jackson, who works on the business development team for the Brown Daily Herald, says she looks forward to offering fresh ideas for the student newspaper’s marketing strategy. Shetty says she will bring to her ongoing nonprofit work a better understanding of the importance of relationship-building with funders. And Lu says that what he has learned about business operations and market research will prove invaluable as he starts beta-testing H2OK and looking for investors.
“The way that water utilities work is a lot more complex than people imagine,” Lu said. “What I learned about how they operate will be really useful to me in my venture and future endeavors.”