In the summer of 2020 Career Center of the Graduate School of Management of St. Petersburg State University (GSOM SPbU) helped 455 students to organize internship in non-standard conditions  of this year. Bachelors and masters, who went for the period of quarantine to their hometowns, due to online format were also able to have an internship in leading companies in St. Petersburg and Moscow. 

 

Internship is an integral part of studying, that helps to get acquainted with the business processes within a company and find out what field of activity is associated with specialists in various job positions. In the year 2020 organization of the internships changed: due to the epidemic situation most companies could not accept students in person and were not ready for conducting online internships. Companies from the Advisory Board for the business school, GSOM SPbU alumni and other corporate partners came to the rescue.

 

«This year we done a thorough job of organizing internships for our students. Almost 24/7 we stayed in touch with bachelors and masters and responded promptly to all their questions; we selected companies in accordance with requests in order to help students to prove themselves to a maximum extent, improve their skills and acquire missing competencies. We are grateful for the Advisory Board for the business school for the active involvement in organization of the internships. Among top recruiters of this summer are VTB, P&G, MegaFon, Gazprom Neft. The company L’Oreal accepted for an internship an unprecedented number of students of GSOM — 28 people who were engaged in e-commerce, sales and brand marketing», —  noted Elizaveta Troyanova, Director of the Career Center. 

 

About 30 students had the internships in the companies that were founded by GSOM alumni. «Definitely, we just considered only GSOM students. We absolutely agree that our school forms a certain perception of reality — and that is more than just a combination of the necessary professional skills and soft skills, understanding business processes and marketing. People who graduated from GSOM understand each other at a glance and think in the same way - it is like a miracle superstructure. That is why our team consists of alumni of Alma Mater by ⅔», — explains Ksenia Sherban, Deputy Director of the R&D Department for Research and Customer Experience at FACT.   

 

Some students had their summer internships at the Coaching Center of GSOM. «Owing to circumstances interns worked distantly:  we held meetings in Zoom and communicated via messengers. Students had the following tasks: to review experiences of Russian and foreign universities in the field of coaching, to do a review of the literature related to well-being of students in universities, moreover, to propose an arrangement of organizational structure of the Coaching Center of GSOM SPbU. Besides conventional search engines and public sources, students have contacted personally colleagues from other universities», — told Maria Dorohina, Director of the Coaching Center.  

 

Career Center of the Graduate School of Management of St. Petersburg State University comprehensively tackled the problem of summer internships: in the spring of 2020 staff members of the Center provided webinars, consultations and sent e-mail messages about the internship offers from partner companies. In the end of April in GSOM there was a Management Career Week: going digital, under which students also could find the internship in leading Russian and foreign companies.