Impactships

The GEL Impactship Program connects GEL students with a special type of engineering internship opportunity.

These “engineering impactships, as we call them, represent a collaborative effort between GEL and engineering employers to create highly developmental, engaging, and challenging summer internships that center upon the following three themes.

Impactships will:

  1. Offer high-impact assignment opportunities to participants, as marked by:
  • Participants see the “big picture” of how their work contributes to company success
  • Assignments offer practice in Capabilities of Effective Engineering Leaders
  • The output of the assignment will be of tangible value to the company
  1. Offer serious responsibility to participants, such as (but not limited to):
  • Presenting to senior stakeholders
  • Possession of schedule or budgetary responsibility on a project
  • Being tasked with leading a small team or coordinating the efforts of others
  1. Pair committed and passionate sponsors (e.g., internal mentors) with participants. Such sponsors:
  • Have several years’ experience in their field
  • Possess a balance of strong technical skills and social/interpersonal skills
  • Are viewed as high-potential technical leaders by the company
  • Most importantly: are excited (and able) to commit substantive time to a mentoring relationship 

You may be thinking: these things sound great, but don’t other internship programs already offer similar characteristics?  We hope that is true – after all, these are best-practice features of internship programs. Unfortunately, such features are not universal. A difference here is that GEL actively seeks and partners with employers to cultivate such opportunities, and uniquely identifies the opportunities for you. Further, GEL is involved in facilitating pre-/post- Impactship goal-setting and reflection for students. You are invited to view the guidelines that GEL and Employers established to shape the development of Impactships.

During this pilot year, approximately a half-dozen Impactship positions will be presented exclusively to active GEL students; we plan to expand the number of opportunities in future years. Meanwhile, we hope you’ll strongly consider applying to one of this year’s pilot Impactship opportunities.

The Summer 2021 Impactship partner companies are:

  • Ginkgo Bioworks
  • Northrop Grumman
  • Proctor & Gamble

Information about the specific Summer 2021 Impactship positions and about application instructions will be distributed to GEL students via email announcements. GEL 1s who apply for a GEL Impactship opportunity must have a strong interest in later applying to the GEL 2 Program.

For those students who advance into GEL Year 2: participating in an Impactship fulfills the GEL2 InternshipPlus requirement.