Thank you for your support of our program and of our Public Policy students! The students who have the pleasure of working with you on an internship assignment gain valuable professional experience that they would otherwise not be getting as part of their traditional education here at UC Riverside. We hope that our students are, in turn, able to provide added value to your work environment and to your own professional development as supervisors and mentors.

If you are participating in the SPP Undergraduate Internship Program in an upcoming cycle, you will receive a more detailed overview of the program and its timeline through personalized email exchanges from the SPP. However, you can always check back here for a brief overview of the upcoming year's program timeline.

Updating Your Contact Information with the SPP

If you are an individual coordinating your organization's participation in the SPP Undergraduate Internship Program, and you are transferring coordination of the program to another individual, please just send a quick email to spp-internship@ucr.edu to let us know so that we can update our internal records.

If you are an individual representing an organization in the Inland Empire who would like to explore the possibility of joining the SPP Undergraduate Internship Program, we would love to have that conversation with you! While we do ask that our Partner Organizations provide our students with robust and meaningful internship opportunities, by participating in the SPP Undergraduate Internship Program, we try to help our Partner Organizations by:

• Eliminating the lengthy and often arduous interview process associated with hiring interns. We require our students to complete an extensive application and interview process with our SPP Career Services team. Through our conversations with our students and with you, we strive to make the best internship match possible for you given our applicant pool.

• Providing a third party for troubleshooting internship challenges and questions. The SPP Career Services team has years of experience working with student interns and professional development programming, so whether you're having trouble with a student intern or are looking for ideas as to how to best put your student intern to work, you can always contact an experienced individual for feedback.

• Giving your employees the opportunity to mentor, manage, and learn from the next generation. Some of the feedback we've received from current partner organizations is that one of the more valuable aspects of our program is that it gives employees the chance to obtain managerial and leadership experience by serving as Internship Supervisors. We think some Partner Organizations have also been (pleasantly) surprised to find that their student interns have actually been able to teach them something that they didn't know. Today's students grew up fully immersed in the digital world, and sometimes a set of young, fresh eyes and social media expertise is just what our Partner Organizations need to elevate their own digital engagement tools and strategies.

• Sending our best and our brightest for you to consider for future employment. Today's students are tomorrow's workforce, and we understand that being able to attract and keep talented young workers in the Inland Empire region is of the utmost priority to the area's employers. Our hope is that by connecting you with our students while they are still in school and exploring the career options available to them, you have one of the first opportunities to train and potentially recruit your next generation of employees.

• Providing you an opportunity to further engage with the School of Public Policy (and UC Riverside). A recent Press-Enterprise article called UC Riverside an "economic powerhouse" in the Inland Empire region, and both the SPP and UCR as a whole are looking to further engage with the communities, agencies, and employees in our region. The SPP Undergraduate Internship Program serves as one gateway to further involvement and partnership with the SPP and the UCR campus.
  • Looking to recruit students from outside the School of Public Policy? - We will enthusiastically refer organizations to the main UCR Career Center if we know we can recommend them as great places to work.
  • Interested in finding ways to bring our graduate students into your organization's fold? - We're currently exploring opportunities with some of our more active Partner Organizations to get our Masters students more involved with the work of those organizations. The SPP is always more than happy to help serve your student and university engagement goals once we know what those are.