U. of Michigan’s ‘Opportunity Hub’ Connects College, Career, and Community

Behind the midtown car showroom that in 2006 became the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit sits a little house that is also a permanent installation, a replica of the artist Mike Kelley’s childhood home.

In a corner office this late-July morning, Jane Sheedy and Erin Martinez huddle over their laptops, sharing a draft of a survey to go out to their recent middle-school art campers.

“‘What was challenging about having your work critiqued by other campers?’” Sheedy, a rising senior at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, proposes for one question.

“‘What was one challenge to having your work critiqued?’” suggests Martinez, the museum’s youth-program producer and Sheedy’s mentor. She reasons that the campers might be able to process the question better if it is narrowed down.

The 14 campers studied the work of the American artist named Kaws and made soft-sculpture alter egos of themselves. Two of those critters sit in the office with Sheedy and Martinez: Megan, a devilish, tailed figure, and Hazel, an angel who sees only the good in people.

For Sheedy, an art-history major, the internship is a way to explore whether her interests in working with people, in the arts, and in nonprofit organizations might coalesce. The job is on a continuum with her five years as a teacher’s assistant, seven years working with kids on crafts in a library near her home, in South Orange, N.J., and three years as a camp counselor.

“I do see it as kind of bridging the gap between undergrad and postgrad,” she says.

In the minds of many students, there is college, and then there is career, says Paula Wishart, Michigan’s assistant dean of student development and career initiatives. But it’s not college over here and the real world out there, she says. “It’s all the real world.”

The Applebaum Internship Program, now in its second year, gives students like Sheedy a taste of that real world in a dozen community and cultural nonprofits throughout Detroit. It’s run through the university’s Opportunity Hub, which offers resources to help place students, pairs them with alumni mentors, and helps them to make sense of their internships and prepare for life after graduation through courses for academic credit. Participants see how their campus-developed grounding in the liberal arts, their organizational and people skills, and their self-discipline play out in the 9-to-5 arena beyond hourly gigs as a barista, waiter, or cashier.

The students will discover what they like and don’t like about the work, says Wishart, and the experience will help them make career plans from a position of knowledge and intention, not fear.

“Feeling confident that you’re going to get a job is important,” she says, “but we want to provide opportunities for students to develop confidence that the job matters and that the work has purpose.” These positions are designed to help build that confidence.

Detroit, rebuilding after financial collapse, reaps benefits, too: finding among the next generation potential community and cultural leaders.

One program, Give Merit, helps underserved high-school students develop business skills by having them work on projects with the Detroit fashion brand Merit. If they live up to the program’s standards, the organization also promises them $5,000 in college scholarships.

In its spacious start-up-looking offices within Detroit’s imposing Straight Gate International Church, another Applebaum intern, Abigail Findley, and two fellow interns from the university, Grace Dellorto and Cheyanne Killin, present to their supervisors an “Internship Deliverables” PowerPoint talk outlining what they’ve done over the past month and a half.

They gathered data on Wayne State University’s volunteer positions so that Give Merit can consider recruiting mentors there. They also compiled mental-health resources for Give Merit’s participants and suggested 16 potential activities for summer, when the main program isn’t in session. And so on.

Findley, a rising junior studying biopsychology, cognition, and neuroscience, contemplates getting a master’s degree in social work and pursuing a service-oriented position. She grew up in San Diego and says the Applebaum program’s emphasis on introducing interns to Detroit — it offers sessions on education, philanthropy, and local government — helped her to “understand and respect the community you’re going into.”

The Opportunity Hub

The Applebaum program has required ample investment and carefully developed institutional relationships. Wishart has led those efforts through Michigan’s Opportunity Hub, which started in 2016 with six employees and now has 39. It has given out more than $5 million in internship scholarships and raised $27 million for student support and the hub’s operations.

Students who want a more exploratory introduction to a career or workplace can try a three- to five-day flash internship. Or they can try a virtual internship while staying on campus. In one, a student designed an Instagram site for a photographer. If students are ready to commit to something more, they can talk with alumni mentors and hub coaches to try to find the best internship match.

The Opportunity Hub provides resources for students to determine their own path, not to guide them into pre-set ones, says Wishart. “They own the content. We own the process.”

Hundreds of students have also availed themselves of the hub’s three Applied Liberal Arts one-credit courses to make the most of internships. In ALA 125, students explore how their interests and skills can make them competitive for these jobs. In ALA 225, they take surveys and get feedback that help them do well in and think critically about the work, sharing their experiences with peers online. In ALA 325, for juniors and seniors, students write an essay about the value of their liberal-arts education. Not coincidentally, organizers note, that is helpful preparation for job interviews.

“In my experience, female scientists must be strong and bold in order to be successful in their career,” wrote one ALA 325 participant, Sari Grossman. “It occurs all too often that a woman’s voice is quieted by a louder male one, especially in a field already dominated by men. … Thus, finding the right balance of confidence and humility is essential to the goals I want to achieve as a biochemistry research scientist.”

Rebuilding Mode

As a first-generation-college student on full scholarship, Grace Bergeron well understands the value of her education. A rising junior from Allen Park, a Detroit suburb, Bergeron is an Applebaum intern this summer at the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation. There she helps run the Invention Convention, in which hundreds of elementary-school students submit plans for items that have included underwater contact lenses, school lockers that can serve as shields in case of an active shooter, and peppery highway paint to dissuade squirrels from becoming roadkill. A history major, Bergeron studies the museum’s huge collection, including its classic roadsters, race cars, and railcars, its transplanted Thomas Edison laboratory from Menlo Park, N.J., and the Wright brothers’ bike shop, from Dayton, Ohio, to improve guides for middle- and high-school field-trip visitors. She helps find and coordinate cohorts of teachers who come and learn from the museum’s curators.

America’s dazzling and sometimes troubling manufacturing history hits home for Bergeron. Her dad is a millwright — who specializes in maintaining and repairing machinery, a career he began at 18. He used to work 80 hours a week in a steel mill and now works 50 at a Jeep factory — on the graveyard shift, because at age 50 he’s once again the new guy. She sees him at breakfast when he’s coming and she’s going.

Through her experiences, her courses, and the internship, which she found with help from coaching at the Opportunity Hub, Bergeron has developed a keen interest in labor relations. She’s long been passionate about helping working-class people, she says.

Bergeron and the 20 other Applebaum interns who are fanned out across Detroit over the summer are supported by the Applebaum Family Foundation, which is part of a local fortune built on the Arbor drugstore chain that CVS bought in 1998 for $1.48 billion.

Pamela Applebaum, the foundation’s president and a Michigan alumna with strong ties to the university, says she saw a lot of students choosing internships at for-profits and wanted to gear this program to the nonprofit sector. In tandem with the university, the foundation sought cultural and community institutions that didn’t want to just scoop up free intern hours but had developed niches, responsibilities, and mentorships for them.

“We’ve done a lot of bricks and mortar,” Applebaum says of the foundation’s giving history. But for this program, it wanted to invest in “these bright, supercapable kids who want to give back.”

Detroit is in rebuilding mode. In 2013 it filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, emerging from that bankruptcy in December 2014. The mood among cultural and community leaders might be called cautiously optimistic; there’s a lot of work to be done.

One cultural touchstone of the city, of course, is Motown. In the Motown Museum warehouse, outside Detroit, Hannah Thoms had an Applebaum internship in the summer of 2018. Now she is a full-time employee in collections management, overseeing the work of new interns. A recent Michigan graduate in anthropology, she wants to continue in museum work, although she’s unsure, in the long run, if that will be as a curator or in collections management.

Growing up in Flushing, Mich., near Flint, she played flute and violin and always had an interest in history. At Motown she’s working on the cataloging of a vast collection of vinyl records, stumbling occasionally across curiosities. (Did you know, she asks, that the Motown subsidiary Rare Earth signed a short-lived white rock band called Toe Fat?)

Thoms and the two interns working with her did a month and a half of planning for the catalog. “I realized that a lot of work for me right now will be worth it in the end,” she explains.

Then they started cataloging. They input record numbers, titles and artists, descriptions of front and back covers, and transcriptions of what is written on album cases and the record itself. They scan front and back covers, both sides of the albums, and the record sleeves.

In all, Thoms says, the team has so far cataloged about 70 titles. That leaves some 1,230 to go.

More interns, please.