SUNY Geneseo’s Career Design Center expands to help students

Photo courtesy of Faith Zatlukal

Students face struggles securing valuable internships; the Career Design Center is looking to change that

SUNY Geneseo has committed to living up to its name as a public honors college by responding to its students' high motivations to succeed, and making sure it has the proper resources for them to do so. According to the SUNY Geneseo News Center and Geneseo’s Career Design Center, “During the past two years, SUNY Geneseo disbursed more than $555,000 to 400+ students” to support internships and applied learning applications. 

Over 70 percent of Geneseo students held an internship or undertook field experience at one point throughout their four years of study. As SUNY Geneseo published on their website, that is much higher than the number of students participating in internships in colleges and universities across the United States, which Geneseo noted is estimated to be 46 percent, as per the 2023 National Survey of Student Engagement. 

What is currently fostering the high levels of student engagement at SUNY Geneseo is the recent success of its Career Launch Internship Collective (CLIC), created by the college’s Career Design Center. Geneseo has described the collective as “a high-impact on-campus internship program designed to reduce common obstacles” faced by students, such as lack of funds to get transport to and from their internship, and other expenses associated with serving in their role. 

This stipend given by CLIC is designed for students who face financial hardships or other challenges surrounding working in an internship, as the Career Design Center details. The only requirements for the stipend are that the recipient must be a SUNY Geneseo student taking 12 or more credits, in good academic standing, and must have secured an on- or off-campus internship. 

Not only does this initiative make internships more accessible to students facing financial need, it also aims to increase the diversity of students who are able to secure and complete internships, as Geneseo’s Career Design Center has explained. A 2025 article published on the popular job and internship searching site, LinkedIn, notes that “Key findings indicate that financial barriers” are discouraging students from pursuing “unpaid or low-paying internships. While internship opportunities have grown by 25% in some markets, the fundamental mismatch between student needs and traditional internship structures has created” a negative attitude towards internships. The same article published that only 31 percent of students from working-class backgrounds completed internships, while a higher percentage, 43 percent, of middle-class students took advantage of internship opportunities. 

Furthermore, beyond students’ socioeconomic background, racial disparities can also be found when examining internship opportunities. The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) used their NACE 2023 Student Survey to examine this factor. According to their findings, 35.9 percent of white students did not have an internship, while 37.3 percent of Black students did not have an internship. Higher disparities can be seen among other groups of students. The percentage of students who did not serve in an internship position rises to just over 45 percent among Asian students, and 44.6 percent among Hispanic students. 

Specifically at Geneseo, during the 2024-2025 academic year, “students completed nearly 300 credit-bearing internships,” as documented on the official SUNY Geneseo website. Efforts such as the Career Launch Internship Collective are created to further the reach of such opportunities for students attending our public honors college. 

While Geneseo’s Career Design Center is helping students afford internships, they are also serving students in another important way: helping them find internships. The Career Design Center’s homepage on the SUNY Geneseo website describes the center’s resources, including “personalized guidance to align [students’] strengths and interests with potential career options” and helping them to find internships—and even jobs. Overall, the center, by helping students find and fund internships, has been crucial, especially in recent years with their new CLIC program, in helping students achieve personal and professional goals.