Internship Connections: Training at Work, Strategy at Play

When Rackham Ph.D. candidate Julian Rome first started working as an academic mentor with Memphis Inner City Rugby (MICR) during his time as an undergraduate at the University of Memphis, he was completely new to the sport, although he had experience tutoring student athletes.

“I really love it,” Rome says. “Student athletes have all this drive, and I know we can apply that to school as well. I’m there to help them find strategies that work.”

Now, seven years later and after advancing his professional development through a Rackham Doctoral Intern Fellowship experience with the organization, Rome steps into his new role as MICR’s inaugural director of operations. All this on the heels of defending his philosophy dissertation on the utopian nature of transgender literature—and enthusiastically learning the game of rugby, inside and out.

“My research skills, my ability to think deeply to problem solve and prioritize, and my ability to question whether procedures are really the best are all examples of my doctoral training at work,” Rome says.

Situated in Rome’s hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, MICR is a nonprofit on a mission to close the opportunity gap for low-income students through rugby and comprehensive wrap-around support, creating upward mobility in under-resourced communities across the metro area.

The organization supports nine rugby teams for middle school and high school students, serving young men and women through trauma-informed coaching. Additionally, MICR provides academic support, job preparation, social-emotional learning, and enrichment sessions to help students find their post high school pathways. 

Alumni of the program receive substantive support as they enter their young adult lives through college mentoring. MICR also prioritizes hiring alumni to support their professional development and economic upward mobility—70% of their coaching staff, and 60% of their college mentors, are program alumni, along with two of MICR’s full-time staff.

As part of Rome’s doctoral intern fellowship experience with MICR, he organized and implemented a development campaign and conducted a literature review to gather research to enhance the organization’s fundraising communication and identify ways to improve program efficacy. 

“It’s just really exciting to see, in a research backed way, that all these components of our program are there for a reason and that they’re working,” Rome says.

Before the excitement of his intern fellowship could unfold, Rome had to secure the position. In the course of his career option explorations, he realized that the Rackham Doctoral Intern Fellowship Program, with its two tracks—host sites identified by Rackham and internships that students identify themselves and secure on their own—might help him reconnect with MICR, an organization that he loved in the hometown he sought to return to after graduation.

Rome scheduled a meeting with the MICR executive director, Andrea Wensits, to explore the option of doing an intern fellowship with the organization. Thinking through what a mutually beneficial experience might look like, Wensits encouraged Rome to engage in an exercise that he now recommends to his own mentees and to fellow graduate students. 

“She said, ‘OK, imagine that you’re going on the job market now and you’re thinking about nonprofits. Find five job listings that would be ones that you’d be interested in applying for. Read through them and make a list of the skills that you don’t currently have. Then let’s design an internship around getting you that experience,’” Rome recounts. 

“It was just such an amazing exercise. It prompted reflection in ways that I don’t think I’d really been doing before.” 

In addition to the Rackham Doctoral Intern Fellowship Program, Rome participated in Rackham’s professional development workshops and Ph.D. Connections, an annual career conference organized by Rackham and the University Career Center. 

Rome also participated in the Community Engaged Course Design Workshop, a semester-long professional development workshop for graduate students in any field interested in teaching a community engaged learning course, sponsored and facilitated by the Edward Ginsberg Center and the Rackham Program in Public Scholarship. 

“I kind of came into grad school astonished at the size of U-M and the breadth of its resources, and I just sort of told myself, day one, ‘I’m doing everything.’ My engagement with Rackham was such a big part of it,” he says.

Rome encourages graduate students looking to make the most of their intern fellowship experience by staying centered in the needs of the organization while expressing their own needs as well. 

When first considering MICR as his intern fellowship host site, Rome realized that he may be sacrificing expansion of his professional network by working with an organization that he’d already worked with in the past. When he communicated this concern to the nonprofit’s executive director, she suggested introductions to board members. 

“I got to meet one-on-one with board members to run through some strategic planning exercises and pilot programming,” Rome recounts. 

In Rome’s new position as the director of operations for MICR, he looks forward to spending the first year learning the ropes of the new role before initiating a mentoring pilot program. 

“I think it would’ve been really easy for me to just sort of silo myself in academics, saying ‘Athletics isn’t really my thing.’ But instead I was like, ‘I want to know rugby because this matters to the students that I serve,’” he reflects. “It’s so important to step outside of your comfort zone.”

Learn more about the Rackham Doctoral Intern Fellowship Program.