How Washtenaw County Organizations Are Building the Workforce They Need

Every summer, SummerWorks connects young people in Washtenaw County with paid internships at local employers. The program is run by Michigan Works! Southeast, the Washtenaw County Office of Community and Economic Development, the University of Michigan and Ann Arbor SPARK, and it has been matching students with host organizations since 2016. Those hosts range from University of Michigan research departments to small businesses and nonprofits, and some of the placements turn into roles that last well past August.

This year's cohort

One of this summer's interns, Minha Ashraf, spent her placement at the University of Michigan's Extracorporeal Life Support Laboratory. The lab was founded by Robert Bartlett, the surgeon credited with developing extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, and its work still builds on that technology. Ashraf worked on its active projects, priming blood circuits and helping set up the operating room for procedures, and on the biomedical engineering side, she assisted with the delivery of a lamb with a congenital diaphragmatic hernia so it could go on an artificial placenta circuit.

"The hands-on research experience is something I definitely couldn't have picked up in a classroom," she says. Ashraf is now a U-M freshman majoring in biopsychology, cognition and neuroscience on the pre-med track. She is staying on at the lab through her undergraduate years, and the summer pointed her toward a specialty in pediatric interventional cardiology.

Other students worked in University of Michigan research labs and in campus libraries, doing archival and preservation work. They worked at boutiques and real estate offices, at nonprofits addressing food insecurity, and at organizations supporting re-entry for formerly incarcerated people. In restorative justice programs, they facilitated dialogues, and some worked in child care centers, on farms, and in landscaping. "There is truly a wide range of internships across all of the industries," says Mel Monier, who spent four years as a SummerWorks success coach before moving into the program manager role this year.

Marwan Salman came back to SummerWorks for a second placement this year. His first was a data internship at AdAdapted, an adtech company, and this summer he worked at the University of Michigan Library's Digital Conversion Unit, running quality control checks on scanned images, digitizing old books and materials, managing shipments, and keeping records in the unit's database. He is now enrolled at U-M's School of Information with a work-study position at the same unit that hosted him.

Fiza Canerawala spent her summer at U-M's Biointerfaces Institute alongside a second SummerWorks intern, handling administrative work that included scanning documents, building spreadsheets, and promoting guest speaker events. The biggest adjustment was how much the work depended on her own follow-through. "Unlike teachers and professors in school, in the workforce you are given a task and maybe one email as a reminder, and then it is completely up to you to get your task done," she says. "Our tasks are things that other people are waiting on as well, so it is important that we get things done on time and finish the task properly." Canerawala started at Washtenaw Community College this year, working toward an associate's degree in science before transferring to a four-year neuroscience program.