“The leadership council thought that if ever there was a rainy day, this was it,” says Amy Murphy, director of Holy Cross’s summer internship program, of the economy’s impact on internship programs.

In summer 2009, several employers told Murphy that although they’ve hired Holy Cross interns for years, they couldn’t at this time, some because they didn’t have a budget line item for interns and others because they were laying off employees and feared paid interns would cause morale problems. In turn, the leadership council advised Murphy not to let employers walk away from the program.

“It was an unbelievable position for me to be able to tell employers that, in this economy, we would supplement them for a year,” she explains. “We were able to help them financially and provide valuable opportunities for our students. We demonstrated to these employers that, clearly, we are committed to our relationship with them.”

According to Murphy, the council—which works on this initiative with the Holy Cross summer internship program and the college’s development office—typically funds 19 percent of the internships provided through the college’s program. In summer 2009, it funded 31 percent. In addition, approximately 60 percent of host sites pay their interns in a typical year. Last summer, it dropped to slightly less than half at 48 percent.

Founded in 1997 to raise the profile of Holy Cross among business leaders in the New York metropolitan area, the Holy Cross Leadership Council of New York is a group of executive-level alumni and parents that conducts several key initiatives, including its work with the summer internship program. Council members support the program by identifying internship opportunities and fundraising to provide financial backing.

“Holy Cross is an undergraduate, liberal arts college with a very strong and loyal alumni following,” Murphy points out. “We have a lot of networking and informational interviewing with our alumni, and a good number of the recruiters who come to campus are alumni. In the 1990s, they told us that our students are bright, capable leaders, but they weren’t comparing favorably to their peers at other institutions because they were missing internship experience.”

The college began putting more of an emphasis on internships. Together, college and council determined that internships were a good way to introduce the New York business community to the talent of Holy Cross students, while giving students valuable work experience.

“It seemed like this was a great project for the council to wrap its arms around,” Murphy says. “Council members were in positions in which they could make internships happen, and they had resources and could raise money. It became a great match and [the program] has grown in size and strength.”

The first year that the council partnered with career services to provide internship opportunities to Holy Cross students was 2000, when the council funded 10 internships in New York City. Last year, 148 Holy Cross students took part in internships at 101 sites, including 61 interns at 48 sites in New York City.

The program is open to sophomores and juniors, who apply with a resume, cover letter, and transcript. Murphy and her colleagues review them and select students for interviews before deciding on program participants. Murphy says that the selected group is composed of 75 percent juniors and 25 percent sophomores.

All internships under the purview of the college’s summer program require students to complete specific tasks: learning contracts that set goals and objectives the first week of the internships, self-evaluations and evaluations of the internship at the assignments’ mid-point and conclusion, and exit interviews at the end of the summer.

Murphy says that in the partnership’s early years, selling employers on the idea of offering internships to liberal arts students was challenging. Today, with the connections firmly established, the challenge in this economy has become securing enough funding to meet the need.

“Today,” she says, “there are more opportunities for our students than we are able to fund. In many ways, it means we are accomplishing what we set out to do.”