Carey’s COVID-19 Internship Offers New Opportunity

The COVID-19 pandemic upended internship offers, leaving MBA students nationwide with revoked internship offers and limited back-up options. Carey Business School launched the Build for What’s Next Internship to mitigate the impact on nine Carey students.

“During a time when many students were struggling to reimagine their plans for summer, the Build for What’s Next Internship provided a wonderful opportunity for them to create value for themselves, Baltimore, Carey, and Johns Hopkins University,” said Tracy Carter, associate director of coaching and education at Carey Business School. “In their full-time job search, the story of how students spent their COVID summer will allow them to show resilience, creativity, and agility.”

First-hand experience with the COVID-19 response

Three of the internship projects were built around Johns Hopkins’ own COVID-19 response, as three students placed in the Johns Hopkins Office of Economic Inclusion helped small businesses navigate resources during the pandemic, utilize grants, and create strategic plans.

Suman Parajuli (MBA ’21) worked in the Johns Hopkins Office of Economic Development as a supply chain optimization strategy consultant. He helped develop strategies to broadly share available resources for small businesses through the university health system’s economic inclusion initiative, HopkinsLocal.

“While the global economy was heading to a crisis due to COVID-19, small businesses and enterprises were at the forefront of adverse impact,” Parajuli said. “Amidst the evolving scenario, I was looking for an opportunity to have firsthand experience in understanding the impact of the crisis in small businesses and identify ways to help those businesses stand back on their feet.”

The projects

The other six interns were matched, based on their career interests, at businesses owned and operated by Carey alumni or at organizations they have worked with previously.

Shivali Viswanath, MBA ’21 and a Build for What’s Next Intern, continued her partnership with the Global Engagement Institute to launch MHub, a mental health hub in East Africa. Viswanath first began working with the Global Engagement Institute (GEI) in Rwanda during her Innovation for Humanity course at Carey and was able to continue the relationship this summer by setting up a new customer relationship management system, hosting a series of sales workshops, and spearheading a new partnership with African Leadership University.

“Prior to COVID-19, my summer plans were headed towards a product management internship at a U.S.-based cloud software company, though by April the internship had been canceled,” Viswanath said. “This news came at a time while I was reconsidering my career transition after coming back from Rwanda. I can now say with confidence that I learned more than I ever expected through my startup internship with GEI this summer.”

Other projects included helping a Carey alum acquire five Bojangles restaurants, integrating design thinking into student organization planning, launching an educational after-school app to teach inner-city youth math and science, and determining the feasibility of a partnership between Carey and Johns Hopkins School of Education.