ExpLearn: Internships

Examples of Internships

• Bacardi Internship Program

  Hosted through the College of Arts and Sciences, the Bacardi Internship Program in Jacksonville provides the University of North Florida Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry students with a valuable opportunity to gain hands-on industry experience. As a paid internship, the Bacardi program focuses on various aspects of analytical chemistry, including methodology, instrumentation, project development, and lab dexterity. Students engage in tasks such as packaging migration studies, sample preparation for liquid and gas chromatography, mass spectrometry analyses, and wet analytical chemistry skills.

  Students work in tandem with seasoned scientists within the local industry, contributing to their overall learning. From the hands-on industry experience, students acquire skills in project development and increase knowledge in instrumentation and safety and industry standards. The internship provides networking opportunities and enhances employability. The collaboration with Bacardi in Jacksonville has proven successful with 16 interns employed since 2018, many of whom have transitioned into permanent roles after graduation.

• Osprey Financial Group

  Osprey Financial Group (OFG) is a distinguished program that began in Fall 2002 within the Coggin College of Business. Initially funded with a $500,000 gift from Jody and Layton Smith, OFG allows a select group of students to manage a portion of the UNF Foundation's endowment. The value of OFG has since grown to over $1.6 million.

  This unique program at CCB admits up to 12 students each year for a two-semester sequence. It is open to senior undergraduate finance majors and MBA students specializing in finance. The design of OFG is to simulate the experience of a professionally managed fund as closely as possible. Students take on various roles, like those in a real money management firm, such as decision-making about the fund's composition. Each participant has an assignment to focus on one of the eleven sectors of the S&P 500 Index, thus developing expertise in that area. In addition, students cover specific geographic regions and special focus areas such as small caps, value plays, green plays, and event plays.

  Since its start, OFG has provided over 300 students with a practical learning experience. The program equips them with skills in risk management, valuation, analytical and quantitative methods, and database familiarity. Furthermore, students enhance their communication abilities through regular preparation of buy-side reports and presentations. This comprehensive skill set makes OFG graduates highly marketable, with many employers actively seeking them for recruitment.

  OFG is not just an academic exercise but a real-time, hands-on experience, instilling a sense of pride in students selected to manage the fund for their client, the Foundation Investment Committee. This experience often serves as a pivotal launching pad for their careers, creating a sense of community among the cohorts.

• THE PLAYERS Championship

  The Sport Management program ensures that all students have hands-on, community-based learning experiences before graduation, including internship opportunities with the PGA Tour, NBA, MLS, NFL, MLB, and other high-profile sports businesses. These internship opportunities are one of the reasons that the UNF B.S. in Sport Management program regularly ranks among the Top 25 Best Sport Management undergraduate degrees in the nation.

  UNF Sport Management faculty have developed a decade-long partnership with the PGA Tour and THE PLAYERS Championship. Their students experience firsthand the day-to-day operations of the million-dollar retail operation at THE PLAYERS Championship. They gain hands-on knowledge of the many facets of operating a golf retail store, including driving sales through effective merchandising, marketing, customer service, sales, and tournament operations. This opportunity allows them to work directly with PGA professionals and to meet and network with many of the world’s largest sporting goods manufacturers.

  In 2023, fifty-five Sport Management students volunteered at THE PLAYERS Championship for a total of 1,825 hours over ten days. Over the last four years, 130 students have contributed 5600+ hours. In return, THE PLAYERS Championship contributed $53,255 to the establishment of four Sport Management endowed scholarships: the JT Townsend Scholarship, the Manny Hernandez Scholarship, the Vernon Walker Scholarship, and the E. Newton Jackson Scholarship.

• Florida Data Science for Social Good (FL-DSSG)

  Inspired and modeled after similar successful programs in Chicago and Washington, the Florida Data Science for Social Good (FL-DSSG) program blends data science and technology design to inform and solve important wicked, social problems in Florida using data-informed approaches, while creating educational programs for aspiring data scientists. The FL-DSSG program is an intensive, twelve-week paid internship experience, where students are placed on multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional teams and matched with mentors to address real-world problems for our clients.

  FL-DSSG works alongside the Nonprofit Center of Northeast Florida, which helps identify potential non-profit and public sector organizations in Florida that might benefit from the program. The selected non-profit and public sector organizations are assigned a team of interns from diverse disciplines with whom to work on identified data science projects.

  The student interns analyze data, find hidden trends, identify impactful, data-driven solutions, and create decision-making tools to address questions and social issues for their non-profit and public sector partners. This entails a feedback loop where the interns are continually communicating with their community partners. Each intern team also has at least one appointed data science expert (UNF faculty member or industry partner) to provide advice, suggestions, and guidance throughout the internship experience.

  The culminating experience for FL-DSSG is The Big Reveal, hosted annually in August. During the Big Reveal, intern teams present their work to non-profit and public sector organizations, UNF leadership, and guests. Each team showcases the problem they addressed through the project, the solution they developed, and insights gained throughout the internship. After the presentations, representatives from among the community partners express how the work of the internship students will affect the work of their respective organizations.