Internships

Pots were boiling, pastries were baking and bodies were moving Wednesday as students at Aliso Niguel High School prepared a special luncheon to announce the start of an internship program to teach students the restaurant business. Students spend 15 hours a week working at local restaurants as part of their Culinary Arts Department curriculum. They also may receive community college credit.

The message was simple: Santa Ana students, struggling to make ends meet and go on to college, need more paid internships. To get the point across, about 350 residents from throughout Orange County gathered in St. Anne's Church Tuesday night to rally for the cause and extract promises from local politicians and business leaders. One commitment came from Orange County Business Council representatives, who promised up to 60 paid internships within the next year.

The Getty Grant program will give $293,000 to 45 museums and visual arts organizations in Los Angeles County so they can offer summer internships to 90 college students of African American, Asian, Hispanic, Native American and Pacific Islander descent. The Getty Grant Program started the internship giving program last year to introduce a diverse group of students to the museum field.

Cal State Fullerton has won a $130,000 federal grant to study how internships boost undergraduate education. Internships involve placing students with businesses and companies for on-the-job training and learning. "We want to find out if students who complete a co-op internship learn any more in terms of content knowledge or skills than students who simply complete a business degree," said B. Thomas Mayes, a Cal State Fullerton professor of management.

At least 12 Ventura County businesses are being sought to participate in a summer internship program designed to help high school teachers better prepare students for the job market. This is the second year the internship program will be offered to selected teachers, said Roberta Barbee, a member of the Ventura County Economic Development Assn., the sponsor of the program.

Some students get to intern at television stations, others at Fortune 500 companies. But a handful of students at El Segundo High School have a different but no less important internship at the Hyperion Treatment Plant in Playa del Rey, where they learn to turn gas into energy and see sludge recycled. The program, begun last year, takes students with backgrounds in science, biology and math and lets them spend 20 weeks working at the plant.

For the 10th year, the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, a Boyle Heights nonprofit organization, is inviting Latino college students to apply for a summer legislative intern program. The five-week internships are designed to give students a behind-the-scenes look at how public policy is developed and implemented at the state and national levels.

While others his age were cruising the strip this summer, 18-year-old Brian Wilson was working on a way to make that drive more efficient. As a participant in Inroads' Los Angeles office, a nonprofit organization that places high-achieving minority students in internships with business and industry, the UCLA freshman worked as a lab technician at an Arco refinery in Carson.

For college students hoping to find a job after graduation, completing an internship is virtually becoming a prerequisite. What happens, though, when students who must work to put themselves through school are offered internships at no pay? And what if some of the more elite internships ask students to relocate for 10 or 20 weeks at a time to such cities as New York or Washington, where rents are exorbitantly high?