![Director of Career Development David Bell and Matias Wolansky '16](https://www.hamilton.edu/assets/mmlibrary/images/original/dbellmwolansky.jpg)
Gaining work-related experience through internships is one way of increasing your likelihood of getting hired. However, many students find the hunt for internships to be daunting because they don’t know where to begin. Luckily, the Maurice Horowitch Career and Life Outcomes Center provides students with resources to make this process easier, such as networking workshops, LinkedIn advice, and access to the alumni database. In January, the Career Center launched its newest tool, the Hamilton Peer Internship Network (HPIN).
HPIN taps into previously unutilized networking opportunities by compiling a database of students’ previous internships. David Bell, director of career development, noted that, “Each year at graduation approximately 85% of seniors leave Hamilton having had at least one internship, while 70% actually complete two or more. This represents a significant number of great opportunities that could be available for other Hamiltonians … [which was] our primary motivation for capturing this information and making it available to all students.”
Working on a Levitt Center Social Innovation Project, Matias Wolansky ’16 stayed on campus last summer with Bell to create an internship database with social media functionality -- a platform college students are already deft at navigating.
Wolansky, a Levitt Social Innovation Fellow, described the project: “We hope to create a ‘pay it forward’ culture for internships on campus; when underclassmen who have used HPIN to obtain valuable internship information become upperclassmen, they will hopefully decide to become contacts in HPIN and share information about their internship experiences as well.” Bell added that, “Although not at all widespread, this type of resource can be found at other liberal arts campuses,” and is excited to bring it to the Hamilton community.
“Coincidentally David was already planning on creating an internship database for students,” Wolansky commented, “but liked my additional idea of adding a social media functionality where students could also reach out directly to other students to meet up and talk about internships.”
The service is currently available, although at the moment Wolansky is “responsible for approving internships and uploading paper entries to the database.” He added that, although “David and I are co-managing the database and its strategy,” the hope is that eventually “it [the database] will run itself, with students autonomously uploading their internships and reaching out to each other to learn more.”
Wolansky is a government major and economics minor, who is pursuing a career in banking and financial services or corporate finance.