[Chere Peguesse]

I will be working with Enay Coaching, a local business offering tutoring and professional development for both local schools and industry, to write a proposal for training and internships beginning with our Level 3 tutors. The idea is to create an experiential learning opportunity where these tutors work with, for example, people who need to brush up on their math skills to do their jobs better/more accurately in, say, a factory. To begin with, we’d like to set up an internship through the Co-op office, for our most advanced tutors. Enay Coaching would provide some leadership training and the experiential opportunity. Two of my former tutors now work for Enay Coaching full time. The are excellent models for what’s possible out there.

I see this opportunity 1)expanding our pool of excellent tutors, 2)who can then put this leadership experience on their resumes, 3) who can engage in “real world” problem solving with people in industry and schools, thereby connecting the university and the community, and who can 4)apply what they learn to helping VSU students, including how various subject areas actually play out in the world of work, which makes their Core classes make more sense, which can 5) attract more students to enroll and STAY with VSU until they graduate. It’s a great opportunity to promote our STEM classes, and I can imagine this opportunity encouraging other community businesses to engage our students in more internship opportunities, which could expand the pool of potential student interns to other programs/groups/academic programs on campus.