While our Work Skills Seminars focus on building specific skills that will help students succeed in their internships and careers, our mentoring program aims to offer individualized coaching and support, building a student’s social capital and network. In mentoring conversations, students benefit from discussing and refining their resumes, preparing for interviews, and learning from their mentor’s career pathway and experience.

Students must interview and convince you that they can succeed in your internship - we do not require partners to hire interns if they don’t deem the students qualified for the role (this hasn’t been an issue for COMPETE so far). Prior to interviewing, you will have access to all student resumes, which we ask you to rank and then identify your top 4 interview candidates for each role. We will provide you with two additional candidates to interview to round out your list. This provides all students with invaluable interview experience and introduces you to students that are sometimes more impressive in person than on paper.

Yes, during the final phase of the COMPETE program in early fall, we ask all corporate partners to interview additional students (whether they have open permanent positions or not) as a means for measuring the job readiness of our COMPETE cohort and to provide individual students with feedback for improvement to their interview skills and resumes.

Following each interview, there’s a quick form we request interviewers to complete to share feedback on the student’s performance in the interview. With your permission, we share this feedback with our students to help them continue to improve.

At the end of your internship, we will ask you to complete a brief evaluation of the student to share feedback with STEMatch and the student on their performance, skill development, and areas for future growth.

In 2019-2020, STEMatch worked with companies such as IBM, State Street Bank, Point32Health, Mimecast and others to evaluate 1-2 year college students and assess their “hireability” for entry level tech jobs. STEMatch designed COMPETE to provide the additional training and experience that these companies’ executives determined 1-2 year college students needed to succeed in an entry-level tech job.