Happy Monday, Reader!
Years ago, I hired a brilliant student as a peer advisor.
Sharp. Humble. Wise beyond her years.
And she had this line she’d offer students, always with a half-laugh, half-sigh:
“Internships beget internships.”
She said it because she’d lived it.
And so had the hundreds of students who sat across from her, stuck in the loop where:
- entry-level jobs require experience,
- internships require experience,
- and getting a first chance feels almost impossible.
Here’s the kicker:
Internships are more important than ever.
AI is reshaping early-career roles.
Employers want students who can show, not tell, their skills.
Parents and presidents want a clean ROI story.
But when the first rung of the opportunity ladder rises, it’s the students with the fewest connections who get pushed further from it.
Traditional internships can’t scale fast enough to meet demand or today’s hiring expectations.
So the question becomes:
What if we brought real-world, employer-connected learning into the curriculum, at scale, for every student?
The challenge: experiential learning matters, but the model is broken
The research is clear:
- Internships reduce long-term underemployment risk. (Burning Glass/Strada)
- High-impact practices correlate with higher GPAs and retention. (NACE + SUNY)
Everyone is aligned on the value. The problem is the delivery.
Across campuses, I see the same barriers:
Tracking is messy.
Experiences are scattered across offices, spreadsheets, and heroic improvisation.
Quality is inconsistent.
Was it a true high-impact experience or a mildly interesting Tuesday?
Scaling is nearly impossible.
Employers can’t take hundreds of interns.
Faculty can’t absorb more load.
And staff? Already working at heroic capacity.
Equity gaps persist.
Only 40% of graduates have an internship. (Gallup)
For first-gen students, just 27%.
And the market pressure is intensifying.
8M+ students want internships; ~2.5M quality ones exist. (BHEF)
AI is compressing entry-level hiring.
That’s why institutions are finally asking:
What if “experience” didn’t depend on scarcity?
Featuring Podium Education: Scalable experiential learning for every student (paid feature)
This is where Podium Education comes in, and why I said yes to featuring them.
Podium Education is the leading experiential education company delivering for-credit, fully digital, industry-integrated, career-connected learning at scale.
Their ecosystem includes:
- 100+ university partners (ASU, Harvard, UT Austin, plus dozens of access-oriented publics).
- 50+ employer partners (L’Oréal, Intel, OpenAI, The Grammys).
- 1.7M+ eligible students, including 550K+ Pell-eligible.
Their mission is simple:
Make high-impact, career-connected learning accessible to every student, not just the privileged few.
Podium: real-world learning in the curriculum
Podium’s for-credit experiences bring real-world, immersive industry projects into the degree, featuring authentic challenges and live interactions that build career-ready skills.
Think: internship energy + real world projects + career readiness accelerator — all in one experience.
It’s built with employers.
Delivered at scale.
Accessible to every major.
How Podium's Experiences work
1. They fit into existing degree plans
- Counts toward the 120 credits students already need.
- Works for all majors.
- Academic oversight ensures alignment with institutional learning outcomes.
2. Students complete 7–8 employer-designed projects
These are real challenges co-designed with Intel, L’Oréal, The Recording Academy®, OpenAI, among others. IOW, not fake case studies.
Each experience helps:
- Build a resume-ready portfolio
- Use top tools employers want like Tableau, Excel, Shopify, and Canva
- Strengthen core career competencies like collaboration, creativity, and confidence
- Walk away with work they’re proud to show off
3. Live Labs: collaboration at scale
Synchronous, high-energy sessions where students build:
- communication
- teamwork
- problem solving
- critical thinking
A student at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley might work alongside a student at Harvard. That’s social capital building at scale.
4. Clear, measurable learning outcomes
Mapped to institutional priorities:
- global and intercultural competence
- career readiness
- technical skills (data, marketing, coding, AI)
5. Faculty oversight without overload
- One instructor can oversee ~1,000 students.
- Dashboards surface progress, engagement, and risk.
- Faculty focus on reflection and academic continuity.
This is why I describe Podium’s experiences as curricular infrastructure, not extra programming.
If experiential learning is the future, this is one of the clearest paths forward
Podium’s experiences proves that when students get meaningful, employer-connected experience inside the curriculum, the student-success needle moves.
Across Podium’s partners:
- 97% completion rate
- 95% of alumni report career benefits
- 78% say it made them more competitive
- 84% say it made their degree more valuable
That’s when experiential learning stops being extracurricular, and becomes institutional identity.
When you embed high-impact practice at scale, you get:
- earlier career clarity
- stronger confidence
- improved competitiveness
- higher progression and persistence
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Want to explore Podium’s experiences?
If your institution is struggling to scale experiential learning—or you simply want a model that works without burning out faculty and staff—Podium is worth a serious look.
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Final thought
Experiential learning is no longer a nice-to-have.
It’s becoming the foundation of retention, readiness, and long-term student mobility.
And when students practice real-world problem-solving early and often, everything else — confidence, clarity, outcomes — accelerates.
More experiences that actually move students forward? Yes, please!
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