Last year, Adam Hewitt was about to start the last semester of evenings classes before getting his MBA when he picked Bob Gemmell’s “field study” entrepreneurship class, partly because he wouldn’t have to drive to Georgia State University’s campus in downtown Atlanta.
Eight months later, the former high school teacher is still making the drive from his Alpharetta home to the small Norcross company where he worked as a part-time intern. The company not only hired him, but wants to recruit another student from the same GSU class this spring.
GSU is one of a growing number of business schools around the nation that have incorporated internship-like experiences into classes to give students a real-world taste of what it’s like to work in entrepreneurial ventures before they graduate.
At Harvard’s business school, for instance, about 900 students a year pick from a list of companies where they can work on a project for class credit, or they can recruit a company themselves.
At Georgia State’s business school, about a dozen full-time and part-time students each term take the field study entrepreneurship class. They tackle projects at businesses that agree to pay $1,000 toward a scholarship. The students get to keep the $1,000 if they successfully complete their work for their companies and earn grades of “B” or better.
“For some of them, it’s life-changing,” said Bob Gemmell, director of the Herman J. Russell International Center for Entrepreneurship at GSU. “They’re going to see what it takes to do it — what entrepreneurs deal with day to day.” Gemmell was co-founder and CEO of a Duluth-based wireless technology company, Cirronet, that was sold in 2006 for $24 million.
Renee Funk, a 36-year-old epidemiologist and veterinarian at the Centers for Disease Control, has been spending her Friday afternoons and off hours learning the ropes at RAISE Global Services. It’s a young non-profit company that aims to be something of a match-maker between charitable organizations and companies that can support their causes.
One of her tasks has been to research companies’ charitable giving to incorporate into a database and an online marketplace, Raisemart. It’s where customers can search for information on companies and charitable organizations, and also shop for products that result in contributions to causes they support.
In another task, Funk said she prospected at the wholesale showroom of downtown Atlanta’s AmericasMart to recruit vendors to join RAISE Global Services’ website.
“It’s been a really great experience,” said Funk, because she has gotten a chance to see the start-up firm’s founder, Carol McKown, in action. “She is clearly a very experienced salesperson and marketing person. It comes natural to her.”
Brian Chew, a part-time student at GSU’s MBA program, picked Integrated Media Association, a young association for public radio and television stations.
“I’m a public radio junkie, listen to it every morning,” said Chew, 51, manager of data administration at the real estate listing service Georgia MLS.
So far, he’s been helping the association set up an online information center to allow its members to keep abreast of developments in media law, set up web pages and measure online traffic.
But soon, he will start work on an email and social media campaign to member stations to build awareness of the online knowledge base.
Such marketing experience could be helpful for his own entrepreneurial dream, an urban agricultural concept called Second Story Gardens. He and two other GSU students recently won $18,000 in cash and services at GSU’s business plan contest with their idea, which would establish “aquaponics” units near urban markets. Combining fish tanks and plants grown in water in a symbiotic system, the students hope their aquaponics farms will commercially produce tilapia, lettuce and other produce that is cheaper to transport and fresher than conventionally produced foods.
“It’s definitely a possibility we’ll be moving forward,” he said.
In Hewitt’s case, his field study turned into a new full-time job and career change. In the fall of 2011, he was teaching history and overseeing the gifted students program at Centennial High School in Roswell when he signed up for Gemmell’s entrepreneurship field study class.
In his last term at Georgia State’s evening MBA program, Hewitt, 40, had bounced between the teaching and business worlds. He once owned a small newspaper in north Georgia, worked as a mortgage lender, and provided computer systems support at a high school.
Like other students in the field study class, Hewitt interviewed at a number of companies he was interested in to land a field study project before the class started. He met Steve Haase, CEO and owner of INSUREtrust, a specialty insurance agency that wholesales commercial insurance policies to cover firms’ losses if their computer systems are attacked by hackers or viruses.
“We kind of hit it off well,” said Hewitt. Before he knew it, he was spending his evenings and weekends helping the seven-employee business collect and analyze customer data and develop a marketing plan.
Soon, Hewitt was INSUREtrust’s de-facto marketing manager, publishing an electronic newsletter and developing its marketing plans. Before the class was over, Haase had offered him a full-time job doing the same thing.
Hewitt said he was relieved because he “didn’t want to go through the dance of interviews.” But he said such classes are also valuable because they let students get beyond the theory in textbooks.
“You get to bounce it off the guy who has to make payroll every month,” he said.
Haase, a GSU graduate who has had two other part-time interns under the program, said it has been a good deal because, for $1,000, he gets several weeks of part-time help to “beta test” potential employees.
“We’ll be doing it again,” he said.
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