Carleton’s Sprott School of Business and Mitacs partner to create internships to support business recovery
Over the past year, Carleton University’s Sprott School of Business partnered with Mitacs to create over 50 student internships to help organizations adapt and recover from the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The experience was fantastic,” said Sachin Dani, who recently completed Sprott’s MBA program, about his internship with Canadian Science Publishing – Canada’s largest publisher of international scientific journals. “I was assigned a project to create a sustainable forecasting tool for CSP to forecast the impact of their strategic transition to an open-source format on the volume of articles in their journals.”
Mitacs is a national, not-for-profit organization that designs and delivers research and training programs in Canada. Sprott and Mitacs collaborated to launch the Sprott-Mitacs Business Strategy Internships (BSI), which provided students with a $10,000 grant to work on a four-month project to support a partner organization in restoring or adapting their business operations in response to the impacts of the pandemic.
The internships gave students meaningful work-integrated learning experiences during a time when employment opportunities were limited. In addition, organizations were supported with the costs of the internship, with Mitacs covering $5,000 and Sprott and the organization each paying $2,500. In some cases, Sprott was able to provide additional funding to offset the organization’s cost. Students completing internships were paired with a faculty advisor for guidance and support.
“This work allowed me to implement my learnings from the MBA program in a real-world business environment, while gaining an understanding of managing a project that involved managing stakeholders, conducting business analysis and delivering a project outcome within a specific timeline,” said Sachin.
Alyssa Gonneau, a third-year Bachelor of Commerce student, worked at Hovey Industries – a design and manufacturing company – as a marketing and e-commerce strategist.
“I worked to develop a marketing strategy and created an E-commerce website to market, sell and fulfill orders for a new outdoor product line consisting of solar-powered LED light posts, privacy screens and pergola kits,” Alyssa said. “This experience added to my overall education at Sprott.”
Marco Campagna (BCom/85), president of Hovey Industries, said that this was the first time they worked with a business student as they usually only hire interns for their technical operations.
“My experience working with Alyssa was better than we could have ever expected or imagined,” he said. “We’re going through a transformation here at Hovey and the opportunity came up to use Digital Mainstreet and Mitacs to create a digital e-commerce platform for products we’re creating. This is an arena we’ve never been in before, so I relied on Alyssa a lot.”
“I basically told her that she needed to take this on, and I would support her in whatever fashion she needed. She took on that challenge brilliantly.”