Internship Coordinator Profile: Gerald McNulty

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.