On Feb. 24, the university announced its new Internship Signing Bonus program. Beginning this summer, the program will provide $100 to students who complete a qualified internship.

The program is meant to encourage career development and maximize the return on investment of earning a college degree.

In an interview, university President Jens Frederiksen said, “In some ways, this signing bonus was an opportunity to say to students ‘we see you, we wanna recognize you, we wanna acknowledge (you)’ and trendset for other students to be like ‘hey, Jimmy went to Medtronic and he got a $100 signing bonus.’”

Along with the monetary incentive, each year there will be an event meant to celebrate those who successfully completed an internship the previous academic year.

This program is currently funded by Frank Majors, co-founder of Nephila Capital, a leading investment manager specializing in reinsurance risk.

Frederiksen has grown to have a personal relationship with Majors over the years. “It’s a gentleman I’ve known for… seven, eight years, and he’s traditionally somebody who’s supported higher education in the form of scholarships and high schools and so forth.”

The university expects the number of students who take part in internships to surpass 1,000 following the integration of the signing bonus, which would be an almost 43% increase from the 700 undergraduate students who completed internships during the Fall of 2024.

Frederiksen continued to emphasize the importance of internships. He said, “internships are really hands-on practical experience, but it’s also the best kind of interview. If you do a good job, nobody wants to sit and peruse databases of candidates that do a million interviews. If they met you and you’ve done a brilliant job through a summer and something opens up, you’re gonna be the first call, right?”

In the same publication that announced the new internship signing bonus program, the university mentioned its purchase of the Railroad Salvage adjacent to the main campus, and the intention to use it in an effort to create immersive learning opportunities for students.

At the moment, there is no exact date as to when we can expect the university to start transforming the building with three to four months left for Railroad Salvage to move out of the building. However, Frederiksen is hopeful that renovations will start within 12-16 months.

The university has said the building will become a Research and Development Center that will allow private industries to establish a physical presence on campus. This will in turn open up more internship opportunities for students. “It is the bridging of academia and industry. It’s how do we bring this to life where real companies would have 15,000 square feet there working on a robotic steel and our students would be involved, faculty would be involved and it would be so that you could go across the street and do your internships, right?” Frederiksen said.

As of now, the program is only open to undergraduate students. However, Frederiksen expressed interest in one day expanding the program to be open to graduate students as well as increasing the incentives. “We’d also love to see if we could incentivize it for graduate students, we would love to make it $150, we’d love to sort of prolong it over periods of time,” said Frederiksen.