Summer no break time for Eastern Iowa summer interns

Every summer since 2008, 20-year-old Matt Yandell has shunned the life of beaches, baseball and barbecue that epitomize the season.

Yandell, an Iowa State University student, is working on electronic flight-control interfaces at Rockwell Collins in Cedar Rapids under a continuing internship that began in his senior year at Linn-Mar High School. He's also taking a couple of college-level classes.

Does Yandell ever miss summer?

“I want to be here a lot of the time, because I get to learn, I get to expand my knowledge and I need to save for school,” Yandell said.

“Besides, you'd get bored after two weeks anyway!”

Rockwell Collins runs year-round internship programs for high school and college students. The programs dovetail and are designed to encourage top students in science, technology, engineering and math to stay with Rockwell Collins, from high school to employment upon college graduation.

“We're looking for the best and the brightest, of course,” said Lisa Carrara, high school technical intern program manager at Rockwell Collins.

Summer is the prime interning season, with dozens of high school students and about 250 college students interning in the Cedar Rapids area.

Interning has incredible advantages when it comes to being hired after graduation, said Larry Hanneman, director of the Office of Career Development Services at ISU College of Engineering.

Hanneman said co-op students, who rotate between semesters working at a company and semesters attending school full-time, have a 90 percent chance of being employed full-time, accepted into graduate school or accepted into military employment upon graduation.

ISU engineering students with internship experience before graduation have a 83 percent chance of having one of those three outcomes, compared with 80 percent for students with summer work experience and only 57 percent for students without work experience.

The image of interns as cheap labor for trivial and unnecessary projects is a false stereotype, Hanneman said. The average hourly wage for internships for ISU engineering students is $18 per hour.

“You're not going to pay that kind of money to have someone make copies,” he said.

Some Rockwell Collins high school interns receive Department of Defense security clearances to work on projects in the government systems division, said Carrara.

She said high school interns have performed exceptionally well with responsibilities like systems verification testing - essentially checking that finished products perform as specified - because they are so detail-oriented and good at following procedures.

Hiring interns can be almost as careful a process as hiring permanent employees, said Heidi Strohman, director of recruiting for the ESCO Group, an electronics company in Marion specializing in automation systems.

ESCO will have about five college interns this summer. Strohman said the company likes to “grow its own” engineers through internships, in part because there is no college degree specific to automation systems.

ESCO has offered full-time positions to about 90 percent of its interns over the last three years, Strohman said.

The key ingredient to keeping young interns interested is giving them real-life experiences that show the value of what they've learned, said Ruben Castillo, manager of college relations for Rockwell Collins.