Creating space for a sense of place

 

Internships are notoriously hard. Popular culture generally paints the intern as slogging through the day, fetching everyone’s Starbucks order and performing the less desirable tasks day-in and day-out, all with little to no pay. But the Center for Economic Development, a program of the UAA Business Enterprise Institute, is hoping to change that narrative, one intern at a time, with their new Upstart Alpha internship program, a new semester-long program that pairs UAA students with meaningful internship experiences and pays them — $18 an hour.

“Our mission is economic development and a huge driver of that is entrepreneurship and small businesses,” said Julia Casey, entrepreneurship and accelerator lead of CED, who helped develop the Upstart Alpha program and its curriculum. Recently, she said there’s been a downward trend in young people starting businesses, and as baby boomers age into retirement, a widening and noticeable gap has appeared in the small business community nationwide. “This is a problem for economies in general, for small businesses and our communities. This program was created to address that problem — we want more young people to see entrepreneurship as a career path.”

 

The Upstart Alpha program consists of two cohort groups, interns and entrepreneurs. The internship, only open to UAA students, places them with startups across the state for a personalized and enriching internship experience, while the accelerator — the entrepreneurial program — is open to both students and community members wishing to make their startup dreams a reality.

“In economic development, it’s what we call ‘placemaking,’” said Margo Fliss. “What helps people come here and stay besides a job? It’s the community, the place that makes you feel like home and potentially want to raise a family here, that is all important, and small businesses are crucial in contributing to that.”

 

Welcome interns

The cohort of nine UAA students began their journey in early January with placements at startups ranging from tech and aerospace to a coworking space company based in Anchorage and an Alaska-based outdoor clothing company.

Margo Fliss, manager of strategic engagement at CED, said that almost all of the nine interns who were accepted into the program left a current internship to join the Upstart Alpha program. She said besides the promise of a highly engaging, hands-on internship experience, the group of nine students also meet weekly to discuss their experiences as well as sharpen their professional development skills. Fliss said that often professional development is a valuable component missing in the internship experience. The “unwritten rules” of business, so to speak, like meeting deadlines, how to conduct a client meeting, appropriate office attire, all skills that are just as valuable as developing the career and educational experience.

Additionally, Upstart Alpha’s ability to pay each of its program’s interns alleviates a lot of stress startup companies and small businesses face when trying to hire interns. Alleviating that pressure allows the startups and small businesses participating in the program to focus solely on the students they are mentoring and provide them with a much more positive internship experience.

 

“There’s this myth that everybody should have to do an internship, but we shouldn’t have to pay them for it,” said Fliss. It’s an outdated idea she says puts a lot of students between a rock and a hard place. Many students are taking a full course load, as well as working part- or full-time jobs to pay for their education, and non-paying internships force students to make an unfair choice about their education — either gain real-world work experience with no pay, or work to pay tuition and living expenses, but lose out on an educational opportunity. “Internships are fantastic opportunities for students and a very healthy way for them to figure out whether or not they like something, but a lot of times they’re being told we can’t pay you or pay you very little and that leaves students in a lurch.”

So Fliss and CED solved that age-old conundrum by paying the interns participating in the program, which they feel upped the quality of the program for both students and the startup mentors.

 

The interns

“One day I want to start my own business,” said Cannen Burgess, a UAA junior majoring in business management and minoring in Spanish, who has been interning at The Boardroom in Anchorage. Burgess is participating in both the internship and the accelerator program of  Upstart Alpha. “Getting insight into the startup process has been valuable for me.”

 

The Boardroom is a coworking space where many people who are running startups pay a monthly membership to use the space. Like a traditional office, there are private offices, conference rooms and a large open office layout for people to work and collaborate, which Burgess says happens often.

“My work revolves a lot around marketing and growing their customer base and identifying what people want out of membership there,” said Burgess, who works directly with The Boardroom’s CEO and co-founder Katherine Jernstrom. He’s conducted surveys of current members, as well as researched coworking spaces across the country to learn best practices and trends. In addition to providing marketing and research, he’s had the opportunity to work on some special projects for Jernstrom related to her current entrepreneurial pursuits. 

Sarah Deike, a third-year mechanical engineering student in UAA’s College of Engineering, had dipped her toes into aerospace previously with UAA’s rocketry club, and while searching for internship opportunities came across the Launch Company. She had a few friends there who encouraged her to apply for the startup internship program and realized that they were part of the new Upstart Alpha program. Her interest was piqued as most of her collegiate education and experience had been focused on math and science — the startup internship program seemed like a fun opportunity to explore something new.  

“I don’t know anything about business and wanted to learn more about it and see what it’s like to run a start-up and your own business,” said Deike. “Maybe someday even I would like to do the same — that’s what excited me about the program. I could not only apply my skills but also learn about business management.”

Although Deike and Burgess come from completely different educational backgrounds, their goals are similar — to learn more about startup companies, how they function and what it takes to get one off the ground. Although Deike is more en route to follow her mechanical engineering career trajectory, her internship experience has opened up another possibility. Burgess, on the other hand, is all in regarding his own entrepreneurial pursuits, and this experience in the Upstart Alpha program has helped lay the groundwork for launching his own startup company one day.

“Entrepreneurship is more of a mentality than it is of a final product,” said Burgess, who said that the cards are highly stacked against entrepreneurs trying to make it in the real world, but that is not something that deters him, it adds fuel to the fire. “The true value of entrepreneurship is being able to recover from failure and be resilient — and start again.”

 

If you are interested in participating in either the Upstart Alpha internship or accelerator program, please visit https://upstartalpha.com for more information.