The Summer of 2020 was a busy one for Soteria120.  Not because we had tons of business coming in the door though, but because we engaged with 66 students and interns from 10 different schools working on 19 separate projects!

This incredible opportunity came through a platform called Riipen, which is like a dating app for schools and companies looking to provide workplace experience to students.  Because the COVID-19 pandemic shut down many school’s summer internship and co-op programs, Riipen stepped up its matching service to allow for “virtual internships.”

This was perfect for Soteria120, since we are fully digital and do most of our meetings via Zoom or Teams anyway.  Our products are digital as well, so we were even able to get some students involved in not only helping to improve our product development lifecycle but participate in it too. The students worked from home just like so many of us since the pandemic started and turned in assignments and work products via email or cloud sharing.

We weren’t actually planning to have so many students and projects, but with Riipen the opportunities to partner with different schools just kept pouring in.  In the end the schools we partnered with spanned North America and the UK, and included programs ranging from Business Administration, Marketing, Business Analysis, and Research Associates.  We got to work with some intelligent, energetic, and engaged people with diverse backgrounds and experience.  That was one of the best parts, because where all those diverse inputs overlapped we knew there was something important to consider.

We had the students work on some awesome projects.  Here are just a few examples:

• User sign-up process and interface
• Developer management system
• 8 courses drafted, ~100 activities each
• Market research and marketing content
• Risk dashboard for supervisors

Given all that productivity it was absolutely worth investing the time in these internships. It was a significant time commitment, but it gave us the opportunity to develop a lot of assets cost effectively. We will be paring back the number of internships we maintain going forward, but this is definitely going to remain part of our operation from here on out!

For more information about the projects executed and schools we partner with, check out our Student Internships page.