For Annika Hsu, an internship wasn't the first step in her career. It was a chance to rethink it.

Hsu grew up in California and attended high school in China before earning a master's degree in sustainability. She spent three years working in corporate sustainability, but over time found herself wanting something different: work that brought her closer to the people and communities affected by the decisions she was helping make.

That search led her to UIC's College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs and, ultimately, to an internship with the McKinley Park Development Council.

“The first day, my boss said, ‘You’re not going to be making coffee. You're going to get your hands dirty,’” Hsu says. That's exactly what happened.

Rather than observing from the sidelines, Hsu found herself working with city officials, neighborhood stakeholders and community leaders as the organization advanced development plans for the McKinley Park neighborhood.

For someone seeking a more direct connection between her work and its impact, the experience was transformative.

“It’s been really rewarding because it feels like the kind of impact that I want to have with my career,” says Hsu, who lives in Bronzeville. “I felt like a lot of my time in corporate was me telling myself, ‘This is important,’ whereas with this work I never have to try and convince myself because I talk to the people who benefit.”

The internship confirmed that the change she was seeking wasn’t simply a new job. It was a new way of working.

And by giving her hands-on experience in community development, it helped bring that future into focus.

When Carolina Carchi arrived at UIC, she already had a track record of looking beyond the classroom. A 2025 graduate of Chicago’s Roberto Clemente Community Academy, Carchi served as an honorary student board member of the Chicago Board of Education, representing more than 300,000 Chicago Public School students while gaining experience teaching in a bilingual classroom.

Those experiences gave her a firsthand understanding of the challenges facing students and educators, as well as an appreciation for the power of education to create opportunity. They also helped her stand out during her internship with education technology company ThinkCERCA.

Carchi is majoring in computer science, but company leaders quickly recognized that she brought more than technical skills. Her experiences in classrooms and education policy helped ThinkCERCA see its work through a different lens.

“Our people get the value of a new way of thinking about things,” says Eileen Murphy, founder and CEO of ThinkCERCA. “You get a freshness of ideas that’s hard to maintain with adult teams because people get married to ideas.”

For Murphy, internships provide more than a chance to identify future employees. They create space for students to challenge assumptions, ask new questions and contribute perspectives that might otherwise be missing.

Carchi’s contributions made such an impression that ThinkCERCA extended her Sprinternship into a full-time internship.

But while the company saw potential in her as a future employee, Carchi discovered something else: an interest in entrepreneurship.

Working inside an education technology company gave her a glimpse of what it takes to build a mission-driven organization. It also sparked her curiosity about starting something of her own one day.

Some employers might worry about investing in an intern whose long-term ambitions lie elsewhere. Murphy sees it differently.

Carchi “clearly is someone who is saying, ‘I’m going to do something someday. I’m going to figure it out and build it,’” Murphy says. “I’m always happy to help any female founder, and this one is a highly engaged human being.”

The internship has given Carchi much more than workplace experience. It has connected her with a mentor, exposed her to a growing industry and shown her new possibilities for the future.

Lauren Ruffolo’s route to UIC wasn’t a straight line.

A graduate of Homewood-Flossmoor High School in Chicago’s south suburbs, she wasn’t admitted to UIC when she first applied after high school. Instead, she enrolled in community college, a decision shaped in part by a series of jobs at local libraries.

The work sparked something unexpected.

“I fell in love with being a librarian,” Ruffolo says.

Eventually, she transferred to UIC, where she majored in English with plans to pursue a master’s degree in library science. She thought she had a pretty clear picture of her future.

Then friends encouraged her to join UIC’s Freshwater Lab, a program that engages humanities students in the study of water policy and environmental justice across the Great Lakes region.

The experience opened an entirely new world.

Through the program, Ruffolo landed an internship with the Field Museum’s Keller Science Action Center, where she uses Geographic Information System technology to help create a map of cultural and ecological resources in the Calumet region, an area she knows well.

The work combines research, environmental stewardship and community engagement in ways she hadn’t previously imagined.

For Ruffolo, the experience has been about more than building skills. It’s expanded her understanding of the kinds of careers available to someone with her interests.

“This internship is like an absolute dream come true,” Ruffolo says. “It makes me feel like I could do anything. I feel very capable.”

Ruffolo graduated in 2026 and still plans to pursue her master’s degree. But thanks to her internship, she’s entering the next stage of her education with a much broader sense of how she might use it.

When Eman Arsham BS ’26 walked into Google’s Chicago offices, she felt a sense of awe.

A computer science and design major, Arsham was participating in a sprinternship, one of UIC’s micro-internships, that placed her on a team project for the technology giant. Alongside several fellow students, she helped develop and present a proof of concept for an AI-powered chatbot designed to handle travel logistics. Soon, her nervousness gave way to confidence.

The experience proved to be more than a memorable introduction to a world-renowned company. It also helped build momentum. That same year, Arsham secured a summer internship with AAA. The following summer, she interned at NinjaTrader.

Arsham believes her Google experience helped open the door to subsequent internships, each one strengthening her résumé and introducing her to new possibilities within the technology field.

As graduation approached, Arsham knew she wanted a position that would allow her to continue exploring different career paths rather than immediately committing to a single specialty. She found exactly that through a rotational program at McDonald’s, where she will spend time working with different teams before choosing a long-term direction.

She credits her internships with helping her identify not only where she wants to work, but how she wants to work.

“You get to figure out what you like and don’t like, what you want in the future and where you see yourself,” Arsham says. “Without those internship experiences, I’d be very scared going into McDonald’s. Instead, I’m comfortable talking to people, and I understand how the industry works.”