Remote Internships Are Here to Stay

When pandemic lockdowns began in March 2020, business and schools shifted to remote operations. College students who were completing internships had to pivot, too – ending their internship early or finding a way to complete it virtually. 

Professor of Management Lorelei Ortiz teaches the Business Internship course and is co-coordinator of the internship program in the Bill Munday School of Business at St. Edward’s. The program uses feedback from internship employers to identify the skills that students need to improve before college graduation. If internship employers consistently rank interns low on a particular skill, the school can retool courses to boost the skills employers say are lacking.

At the end of the spring 2020 semester, Ortiz wanted to know whether her students had been able to continue their internships after Covid lockdowns and whether they had met employer expectations. She analyzed the employers’ post-internship surveys to determine whether students generally had been successful. 

She found that, overall, the employers’ feedback was very positive. “The employers themselves were amazed that the students were able to make that pivot and finish the work that they had committed to doing at the beginning of the internship,” Ortiz says.

Of the 24 students in the internship course, 17 began the semester at an in-person internship, and seven engaged in a hybrid internship. In mid-March 2020, 18 of the internships became fully remote. These included internships for students who worked in social media, marketing, business development, human resources, event planning and finance. Five internships ended because they involved work that could only be completed in person, such as sales, events management or guest services. (One internship had already ended before the pandemic began.)

Ortiz found that employers generally rated their interns highly on skills such as oral communication, professionalism and productivity and on their overall performance. Some students even initiated or helped with projects designed to soften the pandemic’s impact, such as fundraisers for local charities. “This showcased the interns’ ability to be very innovative and resourceful and apply the skills that they were learning in their business courses,” she says.

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Ortiz published the results in the article “Pandemic Impact on Internships: Did Business Interns Pivot Effectively to Meet Employer Expectations?” in Business and Professional Communication Quarterly in December 2023. There, she notes that her study is limited in the degree to which it can be generalized for other environments. Its sample size is small: just over half of the employers who supervised an intern in spring 2020 returned a survey. Plus, St. Edward’s location in Austin provides its students with many more internship opportunities than universities in smaller cities or ones with less robust economies. Ortiz also speculates that the “global sense of heightened empathy” and “employers’ desire to extend a great deal of grace” during the pandemic may have contributed to a cognitive bias, leading them to assess intern performance more generously than they otherwise might have.

Still, her study contributes to a body of research about the internship experience that can help both universities and employers improve that experience. For instance, the ascendancy of remote internships makes internships far more scalable and accessible to students who may benefit from or prefer remote internships, including students with disabilities, neurodiversity or limited transportation options. Such students who might struggle with the mechanics of an in-person internship “can still have the opportunity to be part of an organization, to build those practical skills and to apply what they’re learning in the classroom,” Ortiz says.

More recently, Ortiz has studied the pandemic’s longer-term impact on internships by comparing data from fall 2019 (pre Covid) and spring 2022 (by which time remote work had become widely accepted). In a paper she recently presented at a conference, she found that her students in 2022 were doing the same or similar types of work at internships that they had done before the pandemic. But hybrid and fully remote internships had become far more common – just as remote work has become more common in general. In fact, by 2022, the vast majority of her students’ internships were remote or hybrid.

“The essence of the work is similar to what they did before, but the modality is very different now,” Ortiz says.

More broadly, Ortiz is interested in Gen Z’s attitudes toward the workplace and how employers can best connect with these young adults, who will soon comprise a significant portion of the workforce. She says that, although previous generations have embraced remote work, Gen Z is different because its formative years and life milestones, such as high school graduation and part of college, unfolded remotely. On the whole, based on her research, members of Gen Z are more likely to seek out the community-building aspect of in-person work and mentorship from supervisors. All this is important for employers to know as they try to recruit and retain entry-level hires.