Student interns learn work skills
Summa Health Systems launches summer program.
Seven Akron high school students stared blankly at 48 gray squares on the floor at Summa Health System’s corporate office.
They would work as a team to cross them, explained Patrick Johnson, leadership development coach for the integrated health provider. Stepping on the wrong square would trigger an alarm, and the team would have to start all over.
Donovan Wray, 17, tucked his size 11 ½ black dress shoes into the nearest 11-inch square. Silence.
He looked up at his teammates, who had been instructed to use only nonverbal cues. With the balance of a ballroom dancer, Wray stretched out his arms, gave his teammates an uneasy glance, pivoted and took a second step. “Beep. Beep. Beep.” As he backed off the mat, fellow intern Briah West placed a makeshift marker on the bad square.
Johnson, a retired Air Force sergeant who usually gives the communication and team-building exercise to employees, found the students’ mistakes, hesitation, frustration and leadership, or lack thereof, to be par for the course.
“Their characteristics and behaviors were no different than people twice their age,” Johnson said with no-nonsense military precision. “That’s human nature.”
Summa’s first summer internship program for Akron students wraps up this month. To populate the pilot program, Akron Public Schools cut in half a list of 50 high school applicants from North, which opens a health career education program this fall, and the STEM school at old CentralHower, where students study science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Summa selected 10 students, with room for more, perhaps next year when the company hopes to include Barberton City Schools.
The eight-week pilot internship camp cost Summa $25,000, an investment considering facilitators hope interns someday return as full-time employees. The Betty V. and John M. Jacobson Foundation contributed another $5,000. Students performed mostly clerical duties for 32 hours a week at $10.10 an hour.
Clinical positions in network hospitals were unavailable. Regulations prohibit high school students from working alongside patients and health practitioners. Students said they flourished nonetheless, learning more than how to make copies, manipulate formulas in spreadsheets, organize files or analyze records.
“It’s been really helpful to see what (health care workers) do on a day-today basis,” said Wray, a STEM student whose career plans have become clearer over the past few weeks.
Wray entered the internship favoring the engineering field and has since fine-tuned his aspirations, coupled with an interest in sports medicine, to settle — for now — on biomedical engineering.
The time shuffling paperwork and receiving periodic professional development will be hard to forget for many.
“This is my first job ever,” said 16-year-old Damon Harris, who bested the beeping mat more than once to lead his tired team to victory.
“Experience is the best teacher,” he said.
For others, saying they worked for one of Summit County’s largest employers beats listing mall employee on a resume. That’s where West, 18, worked before she graduated from North and took the internship.
West said she has been accepted to Ohio State University to study marketing. She also plans to keep every business card she’s handed while interning in Summa’s marketing department.
“I can say I was among the first students to go through the internship program,” West said. “It will always be good to reference this.”
The students gain other, less noticeable, skills.
West said she’s learned to pay better attention and has become more open-minded, furthering her appreciation for the fruits of diversity.
Harris — who wants to be a film director or screenwriter, a far cry from the medical field — thinks himself a better coworker. Most said they’ve cultivated leadership and communication skills that can transfer to most any job.
“I’m sure it will change their outlook and perspective on life,” said Traci Buckner, Akron schools director of specialty programming and former director of expansion for STEM.
Employers seek soft skills — like collaboration and communication — as much as knowledge and aptitude. That’s what Buckner said students gain through internships with the Akron Water Department, GO JO Industries Inc., the LeBron James Family Foundation, Goodyear or other current and prospective business partners offering internships.
Buckner plans to sit down with area businesses in the coming months to talk expansion.
And a new requirement that STEM students take at least one internship before they graduate, she said, should be the model for a successful publicprivate relationship.
“We made a promise to the city” when the STEM middle and high schools opened “that students would be creative and inventive thinkers,” she said, explaining that critical thinking is both a prerequisite and a product of working in the real world.