Internships at Federal Agencies: The Workforce Recruitment Program

Proyecto Visión’s Fall Newsletter looked at how people with disabilities could get employment at federal government agencies via the Schedule A process. A second article discussed how graduating college students with disabilities could approach their job search as they prepare for life after college. In this issue, the lead article already examined the importance of internships for college and high-school students, while this article discusses how college students can look for internships at federal agencies, focusing especially on the Workforce Recruitment Program (WRP).

The WRP was created by the United States Department of Labor to help undergraduate and graduate students get paid summer internships at government agencies.  The program places an average of 300 students with disabilities each year in internships, including 450 at 20 different federal agencies in 2009. The video to the right was produced by the WRP and talks about how it can benefit three groups: federal agencies looking for interns, universities and their career and disability services programs, and students. Here Proyecto Visión will look at how students can participate in the WRP.

The WRP website has very limited information, mainly because students are expected to communicate with their career counselors or disability services programs at their universities, not directly with the WRP. Thus, the WRP website limits itself to providing the following information:

To be eligible for the WRP, students must be current, full-time undergraduate or graduate students with a disability, or have graduated within one year of the release of the database each March. For the 2010 WRP, a student who graduated the Spring semester of 2009 or later would still be eligible. Students must also be U.S. citizens. If you are an eligible student, share this information with your school's disability services or career services coordinator, and ask him or her to contact the WRP Coordinator at wrp@dol.gov. Please understand that we work directly with college coordinators, and cannot respond to inquiries from individual students.

Therefore, students interested in pursuing a WRP internship need to contact either the disability or career services offices at their universities. To learn more about this process, students can look at  the information  several universities placed on their respective websites.  Seminole State College of Florida and the University of Texas at Dallas, for example, list the requirements of the WRP, as well as the benefits it provides. They also give timelines indicating how students need to approach the process. Ideally, students with disabilities will begin their participation in the program at the start of the school year, with the application process continuing throughout the course of the year. On the other hand, last year, the University of Wisconsin in Whitewater and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for example, had a different approach, beginning with informational meetings in February, after students had returned from their winter vacations. As can be seen, different universities handle the process differently. For this reason, students need to be proactive and approach both their disability services and their career counseling offices as early as possible.

No matter how universities handle the WRP progress, students will need to go through some of the same basic steps that are required for any job or internship application: they will have to research potential employers, decide what sort of work they are interested in, prepare and submit resumes, and do interviews with representatives from different agencies.  Again, career services offices can be a great support for students who have to do these tasks, helping them define their career goals more clearly, find federal agencies that do work in fields that can help students progress towards  those goals, write good resumes, and practice interviewing skills.

Temple University’s WRP information web page includes testimonials from students who participated in the WRP program. One of the interns quoted says, “My advice to new interns is to be very diligent and responsible in your job duties so you can learn how to be professional and confident.  Don’t be afraid to take extra challenges on projects depending on your position at your selected agency.” That is excellent advice, and not just for internships. In order to be successful in our careers, we all need to work hard and take on extra challenges. For college students with disabilities, applying for the Workforce Recruitment Program can be an extra challenge, but if they work hard to prepare their internship application, they take a major step forward in beginning their careers.

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