Internship puts student's human resources major to immediate use.

Ivania Padilla

When Ivania Padilla walks at the May 2, 2006, commencement, it will be on the heels of completing an internship in Washington, DC, in the Office of Continuous Learning and Career Management in the Department of Labor (DOL). The internship has given her a great opportunity to put into practice what she has learned in her coursework leading to a bachelor of business administration with a double major in human resources (HR) and management from the College of Business Administration.

“I found out about the internship through the Office of Career Services and the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU),” she said.

It sounded like a great opportunity. Through its National Internship Program (NIP), HACU has been placing promising students like Padilla in government agencies and corporations. Since 1992, NIP has placed more than 5,800 college students as interns. She applied online, was accepted, and, since January, has been involved in a number of projects.

“I am helping out with the MBA Fellows Program, an entry-level development program that puts fellows in different DOL locations for three-month assignments throughout the country over a two-year period,” she said. “Our office does training, and I am helping prepare materials and assemble packages for the classes, which will consist of fourteen fellows each. I also will sit in on the interviews.”

In addition, her activities have included working on registration for a Senior Executive Service Forum for top-level government officials; putting together an orientation book for DOL’s Candidate Development Program, inputting mentoring information in a database, and helping with budgets.

Though South Florida is currently far away geographically, the college is often in her thoughts.

“I can hear in the back of my head something a professor said in a class, and things start clicking for me,” she said, singling out particularly Human Resources Management and Recruiting and Staffing—two classes taught by Dana Farrow, professor, Department of Management and International Business. “They were great.”

As she looked for an undergraduate program, she became interested in Florida International University because she had heard it had a good business program and because it was close to where she lived. Now, she is planning to go on to graduate school and the college’s  Master of Science in Human Resources Management (MSHRM) is a strong contender.

“I’ve heard very good things about the graduate program at the university. I understand it is very flexible and more focused on human resources management than some other programs that are more generally management based,” she said.

In addition to her immersion in government work, which she has enjoyed so much that she plans to pursue it as a career after completing her graduate studies, the internship also gave Padilla her first real taste of winter.

“When it’s a little cold in Miami, we complain,” she said. “Here, it gets really cold. But I got to experience my first snow and it was beautiful, though fortunately, it fell on a weekend so I could enjoy it.”