Research

A By-Product of Summer Programs: Student Marketers and Career-Readiness

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Abstract

Universities are exploring many models for delivering a fuller term in the summer. The structures and strategies of these differing models are invariably aimed at the same thing: increasing institutional awareness, student enrollment, and ultimately university revenue. Yet there is also room for involving students themselves in this endeavor so that the institutions benefit from their insight and labor, and so that the students benefit from on-the-job training that develops the skills prized by their future employers. This paper provides a brief narrative of one university’s shift from the fairly industry-wide, relatively casual approach to summer term of yesterday to something much more substantive today. This story itself is neither important here nor surprising. In fact, many other universities will recognize elements of it. Rather, it provides an introductory context for a surprising by-product: the professional development of student marketers involved in the strategy. We lay out employer definitions of career-readiness and, through structured interviews, demonstrate how supervised involvement in peer-to-peer marketing, much like an internship, enabled students to recognize how they had improved their career-readiness. We argue that the evidence here is generalizable and has implications for practice (and principle) across the academy.

Keywords: summer term, marketing strategies, student professional development

How to Cite:

Sedgwick, G., Ruppert, B. & Zenteno, Z., (2021) “A By-Product of Summer Programs: Student Marketers and Career-Readiness”, Summer Academe: A Journal of Higher Education 13. doi: https://doi.org/10.25894/sa.115