The date: Early March. Coronavirus cases are beginning to rise in America, and hot spots like New York and California are about to implement shelter-in-place orders. Publicis Health Senior Vice President of Talent Programs Laurie Mellon (pictured at top) is wondering what the best course of action is for Publicis Health's storied internship program. "By late March, we had to start making offers to people who would have to relocate, and we just knew that wasn't going to be feasible," Mellon says. The decision was made: There would be no in-person internship program this year.
It certainly wasn't an easy decision. Publicis Health's paid summer internship program is one of WayUp's Top 100 Internship Programs, so popular that over 4,000 applications are submitted for just 70 spots. One reason for this popularity, and one of the most important elements of the program for the students, is that interns get to experience the independence of adult working life in a new city they get to explore, Mellon says. There simply wasn't a way to safely conduct the program.
Having the interns work remotely wasn't an option, either. "We were just figuring out across-the-board remote work, ourselves," Mellon adds. "We couldn't in good conscience throw our interns into that." Mellon couldn't imagine giving up on student programming entirely, though. Instead, she and her team raced to create a virtual academy that, while unpaid, would be open to more students -- 88, instead of the usual 65-70 -- and give them the core offerings, if not the in-person experience.
The result was a virtual program that consists of weekly learning sessions and an in-depth tour of each Publicis Health department, running from June 1 through July 20. The sessions have included early career advice, how the pandemic has changed the marketing landscape, and changes in media consumption. But the crown jewel of the program is that every student gets a dedicated Publicis Health mentor who does at least an hourlong weekly mentoring session with them.
Publicis Health employees flocked to the mentoring opportunity, to the point where supply outpaced demand. The students have all created learning plans with specific objectives for their time in the program, and Mellon says she has been blown away by not just the care given to those plans by the students and their mentors, but the mentors' drive to connect students with colleagues who can also help students.
"The mentor may not be an expert in one area the student is interested in, but will reach out to someone who is, and I think that's fantastic," Mellon says.
One byproduct of moving the internship online is that students who may have wanted to accept an in-person internship spot but had financial or family concerns were able to participate. And because the time commitments are much less onerous than full-time, in-office work, Mellon says, many of the students are in fact working other jobs and gaining valuable experience in a number of different ways.
The students this year are drawn from 47 different colleges and universities and even include students working from Australia and Turkey. What separates them from the nearly 4,000 other applicants are their core skills, whether those are team leadership skills learned on a sports team or customer service skills learned scooping ice cream summer after summer. "We love people with restaurant experience," Mellon explains. "Working in that environment gives you so many valuable, applicable skills." What unites them all, though, is a passion for health.
"Health marketing, health communications -- that's healthcare," Mellon says. "We want people who want to work in health, who want to make a difference." Publicis Health knows that in order to create the most effective health communication, you need a diverse set of talent doing the creating and executing.
Publicis Health already takes part in a number of diversity and inclusion initiatives, including drawing interns from the 4A's Multicultural Advertising Internship Program, and Mellon is looking forward to further broadening Publicis Health's pool of talent.
Mellon says the internship program in all its in-person glory will return as soon as it's safe to do so -- "The interns bring so much energy and such a different perspective to the office, and we love putting them on client work as soon as we can," she adds. The virtual programming, though, has shown Mellon exactly how best to engage students.
And she and her team have now seen just how much this virtual programming can help nontraditional students, or those who simply don't have a life that allows them to pick up and move to New York or Chicago or Philadelphia for a summer.
"One of the coolest things about this virtual academy is that it just lowers the barrier of entry, providing us with access to incredible new talent," Mellon says. "We love our in-person program, but until then, the learning doesn't stop."
You can read the full press release about the Publicis Health Academy, here.
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