Internship connects UIC students with campus and community engagement

Leigh Hellman | Posted on April 23, 2025
Three internship alumni stand next to each other on stage at the Diversity Community Engagement Program new student orientation in Fall 2023 at the Latino Cultural Center. The young woman on the left has long braided hair and wears an orange long skirt, the young man in the middle has a goatee and wears a black and green shirt and the young woman on the right wears light blue jeans and a white t-shirt. All three stand in front of the Awakening of the Americas mural and proudly smile right at the camera.

The UIC Diversity Community Engagement Program (DCEP) is a semester-long program designed to expand students’ career readiness and community engagement skills through an internship hosted by the office of equity & diversity (OED), the seven UIC Centers for Cultural Understanding and Social Change (CCUSC) and their community partners.

DCEP was developed to present an opportunity to all UIC undergraduate students with a flexible for-credit and paid internship program that would help them understand and develop career readiness and community engagement best practices.

While internships can offer crucial opportunities for academic and career readiness, they are often unpaid. Many students are then forced to choose between unpaid internships to further their professional development and expand their network or more limited paid employment.

“DCEP provides an opportunity to bridge this gap for undergraduate students through a credit-bearing and paid internship, while also allowing students to work on community engagement projects with local partners,” stated Jorge Mena Robles, MA, associate director of the UIC Rafael Cintrón Ortiz Latino Cultural Center (LCC).

Students who are selected for the internship usually focus on a community engagement project or strengthening community engagement skills while identifying and investigating pressing social issues impacting local communities. They build professional competencies and relationships, develop decision-making skills, gain knowledge on the purpose and value of academic and community partnerships and develop interpersonal skills that can transfer to their future careers.

During the past academic year, recent interns at the LCC were taught how to conduct oral history and participated in a project entitled “Super Generation Monarchs: Im/migration Oral History Project” where they collected oral histories to create a zine that explored the themes of community support, nostalgia and cultural assets that arose from their collection. This zine was then delivered to the community members who participated in the project.

Mena Robles asserted: “For our communities facing a number of social issues, this program allows for a strengthened community engagement relationship to continue between UIC and our local communities.”