Name: Gerald
McNulty
Position:
Director, Communication Internship Program at Marist College
1. What
is your professional background?
I graduated from Marist College in 1979. I went to work for a small daily
newspaper called the Port Jervis
Union Gazette, which no longer exists, that was in Orange County NY. I then relocated to Vermont with my
wife and freelanced for a while. I
was hired by the Associated Press in Montpelier, Vermont, the state capital,
and worked with them for a little under a year. I then took a job with a newspaper there, the Montpelier Times
Argus. I was a reporter in
Montpelier for about four years, and then switched over to desk work, as its
called here in the business. We relocated
to Poughkeepsie where we had some friends in the business and I went to work at
the Poughkeepsie Journal. I worked
for the Poughkeepsie Journal for eleven years. I held a variety of positions there, from copy desk editor
and copy desk chief to Sunday editor to city editor. I was the city editor for seven and a half years. In 1996, I changed careers. My old internship director, Bob Norman,
had retired the year before. I took
over for what Bob had been doing and spent the next couple of years redesigning
and reformatting the internship program.
It really is almost nothing like what it was, but that was thirty years
ago. I have been the internship
director in Communication since 1996.
I have supervised over 3,000 students. I have created the International internship program, along
with the international folks in 1999 that branched out first to London and
Dublin and Sydney, Australia, and I understand it is now being adopted in
Florence. In 2002, I launched the “New
York Media Experience” program, which was a Manhattan-based residential hybrid
internship and online course program, and that was renamed in 2009 to “Marist
in Manhattan,” which is what it is known as now.
2. Through
the Communication Internship Program at Marist, you work with several students
and interns. What is your favorite
part of working with these students?
The whole idea is empowerment and independence. That is my favorite part—my favorite
part is when students...come back to my office and tell me that they have been
hired, or when their internship experience has literally translated into
jobs. While that’s the goal, that
is almost uncommon. What is much
more common is for many students, not all, but many to become really
independent over the course of one or two or three internships. Another favorite part…is when students
I haven’t really talked to in six months or a year stroll in and tell me that
they have attained that second or third internship—and that they did that
without me because we got them started a year before when they needed
help. That is the goal—the goal is
for them to become very capable career seekers, if you will.
3. In
your professional opinion, what is the value of internship experience?
It’s real world.
It is reality, in that career setting. That is what you can’t get. You cannot get that experience anywhere but that
environment.
4. How
many internships should a college student complete before graduation?
I wouldn’t put an arbitrary number on it, because there are
so many ways to do experiential education. Certainly, as a rule of thumb, it is good for students to
have two different work experiences or internship experiences. But, for some students, doing an
extensive full time semester like we do for “Marist in Manhattan,” it might be
enough. For some students, it is a
singular in-depth experience that changes the way they view themselves and
gives them a leg up, and that is fine.
For the next student, they may have to do two or three because of where
they are in their head, their personal development, their maturity level or their
career choice. One of the values
is learning what you do not want to do.
It is very difficult to explain to students who have developed a
pragmatic approach to education.
That pragmatic approach is understandable, on the one hand, but is also
very shortsighted on the other hand, which is normal when you are 20 years
old. Learning comes from practice
and learning comes from experience and it doesn’t happen all at once.
5. If you were looking to hire an intern, what
qualities or characteristics would you deem most important? How can an intern make an impression at
their new job?
Maturity,
because of the demographic. The
typical college student is working on that. They are at that point in their lives where that is
something that they are working on.
They are getting better at it all the time, but they are obviously not
there at 19 or 20 years old, not necessarily. The candidates who stand out are the ones who are
intellectually curious but accept their role. The candidates who stand out are the ones who challenge
their supervisors on an intellectual basis as opposed to an emotional basis. They see the value of the work as
opposed to the value of themselves in the work. That is a difficult thing to do at that age, it is very
hard, and if you can see that lineation or begin to see it at 19 or 20 years
old, that separates you from the group.
6. What
is the best way for interns to stay connected with their supervisors/coworkers?
It
is a difficult thing. What I would
say, is first I would back up a little bit and try to think of how it works and
what is at stake…Yes you are an intern, yes you worked for them. They have a lot of different interns
there. Do you really expect the
contact to say that you were the best one out of the interns there? What is he going to say to the other
seven? Maybe you were, maybe you
weren’t. Now, fast forward three
months or six months. Eight new
interns came and went. Four more
months go by, another eight are there now. That’s a lot more interns since the last time you were
there! This doesn’t mean we never
reach out. What I’m saying is, be
realistic. Reach out, ask for a recommendation,
keep in touch, but be realistic. I
try to tell students that their job is to make a connection. Don’t get so charged up or take it so
personally when you do not get a call back.
What
really works? What really works in
a work situation is the same way it works with friends and family. Try to make real connections with
people. Not the fake ones, not the
courtesy business ones, and you will know when you make a real connection. It will be difficult to do. You may be an intern at some place
where you work with three different supervisors and ten other interns, and you
may not connect with anybody. That is possible.
The flip side is that you are in a situation where you work with ten to
fifteen people and you really connect with one person, but you connected with
them. Just like with a friend,
send an email once a week to see how they are doing. It becomes more of a personal thing than a professional
thing. You have to be more tuned
in to your own aura and know who liked the work you did and respected you, and
then connect on that work level.
That is hard to do and it will not happen everyday. But when it does happen, you need to be
paying attention.
