Career Services to begin partnership with PICS

Starting June 1 of this year, Career Services will be partnering with Princeton Internships in Civic Service, according to Pulin Sanghvi, executive director of the Office of Career Services.

The PICS program allows undergraduate students to participate in eight- to ten-week paid internships in nonprofit organizations, all of which are sponsored by alumni. The University has partnered with PICS since 2010 in order to offer more students greater access to these internship opportunities. Internships include multiple programs across the nation, including health and social services, public policy and education.

The key change is that Career Services will serve as the primary starting point for internship searches, in addition to providing support through their resources and through various career and life vision programming, he noted.

Director of the Office of Career Services Evangeline Kubu said that in addition to one-on-one advising, Career Services will provide assistance with the PICS application. The application will be integrated into the HireTigers Handshake system, but all other counseling will remain the same, she added.

Career Services hopes to create programming to help students prepare for PICS internships as well as engage with the internships afterwards to synthesize what they have learned.

As Career Services undergoes a re-imagining process that seeks to put in place a new model based on helping students discover who they are, this new partnership will be a great opportunity to build on the way Career Services supports students, Sanghvi explained. The re-imagining process consists of an expansion of opportunities to help students define a unique career and life vision, including Career & Life Vision workshops which Sanghvi himself directs and teaches.

“The heart of the career and life vision emphasis of Career Services has been to help our students engage with the Princeton experience in an intentional and mindful way, where they are able to leverage every component of the Princeton experience as a laboratory to frame questions about themselves, answer those questions and develop a worldview of what matters most to them, where our primary goal is to find a path that will bring out the best in them,” Sanghvi said.

Career Services is excited to work directly with PICS interns to make sense of their internships and help students understand how their internships will influence their choices going forward, he said.

Sanghvi said that students find PICS internships to be helpful in transforming how they think about the world and how they think about the different ways to engage with the world. Students rave about the impactful experience of PICS and meaningful relationships they make with alums, he added.

With new technology to support the application process, Career Services will also provide resources to publicize PICS internships and draw awareness to the program, Sanghvi said.

Service and civic engagement is in the mission of Career Services, Sanghvi said.

“This is really just a chance for continued collaboration with the PICS program and we are very excited to keep supporting [the program],” he added, noting that Career Services has a long-standing involvement with the PICS program, though previously the primary contact for the program had been the Pace Center For Civic Engagement

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“We think of this as a University relationship with the PICS program,” he said.

There will still be continued involvement from many people around the University, according to Sanghvi. The PICS program will continue to offer rich multidimensional learning experiences, he added.

Since PICS is an alumni-driven and alumni-organized effort, the role of Career Services is to partner and support the program, he said. There is positive alumni energy behind the program, especially from the Class of 1969, and Career Services is appreciative of this energy, according to Sanghvi.

“It’s grown as a labor of love and it’s clear in the experiences of students that have had internships through PICS,” Sanghvi said.

Charles C. Freyer ’69, chair of PICS Board, noted that PICS provides experiential learning opportunities, and through the partnership with Career Services, hopes to help students think about and prepare for their work life and their postgraduate careers.

“We are a part of the mission of Career Services — an important part, I think Pulin agrees — to provide that experiential learning segment to the interaction with alumni and the hands-on internship experience that is essential to help people make a decision about what they like to do and what they don’t like to do,” said Freyer.

According to Freyer, PICS’ relationship with the Pace Center was really one of support.

“They provided some support to us, and the program coordinator was a PACE employee,” he added.

That responsibility to provide support to us will now be switched to Career Services; they will hire a new program coordinator, and provide public relations support as well as other support, Freyer explained.

Freyer noted that there are many more synergies between what PICS does and the new mission of Career Services.

“It’s more than simply providing community service; it’s providing community service with the objective of helping students decide if the non-profit world is what they would like to do, either full-time, or part time as an adjunct to whatever career they’re pursuing,” Freyer said.

He added that the program assists students in the career decision-making process while at the same time providing valuable community service to PICS’ partner organizations.

PICS has grown since 2014, he added. Two summers ago, there were only 93 interns participating in the program, and this summer PICS will be interacting with more than 160 students, according to Freyer.

“We’re very happy to be joining Career Services; there are some pretty significant synergies because our missions are so well-aligned and that will be a benefit to Career Services and particularly a benefit to us as well as we continue our growth and try to provide internships to as many undergraduates as possible,” Freyer said.

PICS Program Coordinator Evan Schneider was unavailable for comment at the time of publication.