Including Internships

The state of Indiana has emerged as a national leader in redesigning high school diplomas to personalize student learning while offering more flexibility for career-based experiences. I serve as the associate principal of Chesterton High School (CHS) in Northwest Indiana, where our student population is just under 2,000, and we operate on an eight-block schedule. During the 2019–20 school year, only five seniors participated in work-based learning. Fortunately, five years after implementing a robust internship program, we now feel prepared to provide our students with quality career-related experiences as we transition to the new diploma requirements. The diploma changes will allow for even greater flexibility and personalization of relevant career opportunities for students.

As we evaluated where seniors who had met most of their graduation requirements were spending their remaining class time at school during the 2019–20 school year, we found that 336 of our 461 students (73%) had at least one 90-minute study hall or a block helping as a student aide in the office in their schedule. Additionally, 234 students (51%) had two or more blocks, and 55 students (12%) had four or more blocks of study halls and/or aide periods in their schedules. As a result, one of our new school goals is to ensure at least 50% of our students engage in career-related experiences outside the building during these periods.
Career-related experiences at CHS include internships, career and technical education (CTE), and cadet teaching, an in-house program that exposes students to the teaching profession. Since our students were already participating in local CTE partnerships, our focus shifted to developing and implementing an internship program that would provide even more external placements for our students.
What We Did

Starting from scratch, we first needed to develop a structure for our program that clearly defined roles and responsibilities. With full support from our district administration, we were able to free up blocks for a teacher to serve as our director of internships, and we hired a classified staff member to assist as the internship supervisor. The success of a program like this heavily depends on the strengths of the person serving as the director. Characteristics of a quality director include being a connected member of the community, having an outgoing personality, possessing cold-calling skills, and being able to educate and establish relationships with both students and employers. While the internship supervisor should possess similar competencies as the director, they should also be skilled in data entry, social media promotion, and marketing.
Next, to encourage our students to replace their extra study halls with internships, we decided to offer opportunities that aligned with their specific career interests. To identify those interests, we polled all our juniors about their career aspirations during our schoolwide advisory period. Using the results of those surveys, we realized the importance of enlisting our community to create opportunities for our students moving forward. We invited leaders from the Duneland Chamber of Commerce, Duneland Family YMCA, and Duneland Boys and Girls Club to a presentation on the benefits of hosting Chesterton High School interns. Once we had these and other key community partners on board, we began securing additional business partners willing to participate in our program.
With community partners solidified, we began spreading the word to our juniors before they scheduled their senior year courses. To make internships a viable option for our students, we created a video to be played during advisory, followed by visits from our administrative team to all of our junior-level U.S. history classes. As we highlighted the program, we provided opportunities for questions and invited students to join us with their parents at an upcoming informational night. To reach out to our parents, we discovered that even in today’s digital world, sending an old-fashioned postcard via snail mail inviting them to the informational night proved to be extremely effective. Our informational night has become a highly attended event where we explain the opportunities and expectations of the program each year.
When our students meet with their school counselors to request courses for their senior year, they also complete an internship application that is submitted to our director. At this point, our director and supervisor work together to find and secure placements for our students. This system has helped grow our program from five work-based learning students in 2019–20 to 183 seniors today who are currently earning internship credit. In addition, our school has over 200 business partners and more than 300 opportunities to offer our seniors each year. While Mark Peterson, our director of internships, has secured the majority of our partnerships, we have also had students bring multiple opportunities to us as well. Students now spend anywhere from one to four blocks of their senior year engaging in experiential learning instead of sitting in multiple blocks of study halls.
Our Quantitative Success
Today, we have not only met our school goal of having 50% of our seniors participating in career-related opportunities, we have surpassed it with 303 out of 467 seniors (65%) gaining real-world experience. Internships now have the largest percentage of seniors in career-related experiences, and we anticipate even greater growth once the new diploma requirements are implemented.
Our Qualitative Success

For us as educators, our most rewarding internship successes are the amazing professional experiences our students share with us. We are proud that our students are being offered opportunities right out of high school in college programs and apprenticeships that have traditionally been reserved for those who have been out of high school for years.
Aubrey Isakson was our first student to acquire her pilot’s license, using her internship to accumulate flight hours while it was still light during the winter months. She recently reached out to update us: “I was just reflecting on my last year at Purdue University and the successes I have had. A few weeks ago, I passed my commercial checkride, and I am now a commercial pilot! This was a huge milestone for me, but also very unusual for a freshman—now a sophomore—to achieve at such an early stage. This was only possible because of my internship at CHS, which allowed me to have release time to get my private pilot’s license.”
Ella Girzadas, currently a sophomore at Villanova University studying environmental science and business, is another early success story in our program. During Girzadas’ internship at a local business, The IN Coast, owner Jenny Soffin gave her the opportunity to design her own sweatsuit line for her Lake Michigan-inspired lifestyle brand. This experience of creating a clothing line—from conception to production to retail—has proven extremely beneficial as she pursues a future in environmental sustainability and fashion.
Additionally, we have our first intern, Anisa Faroh, at Urschel Laboratories Inc., a global retailer of food processing machinery. Faroh is interested in human resources, and her internship is with the company’s environmental health and safety department.
Our school’s internship program has provided students, like Isakson, Girzadas, and Faroh, with real-world experience before they even graduate, and we believe our business partners equally benefit from having our students in the workplace. Now, we are looking forward to even greater flexibility for career-related opportunities with Indiana’s new diploma requirements, and we are excited to continue hearing about all our students’ internship experiences in the future.
Kristen Peterson is associate principal of Chesterton High School in Chesterton, IN.