Vermont Innovation Summer 2024: StateChange Intern

This opportunity is part of Middlebury College’s Vermont Innovation Summer cohort program, sponsored by the Innovation Hub. This program supports students working with companies across Burlington’s innovation ecosystem. Vermont Innovation Summer internships will run from June 10- August 2, 2024.  For more information about Vermont Innovation Summer, please contact Dana Anderson at danaa@middlebury.edu.

This position comes with access to affordable, fee-based dormitory housing through Champlain College in Burlington. More information will be available in March upon the intern’s offer of employment, however students will need to accept housing by April 9 in order to secure their spot.  ELIGIBILITY: Interns must have at least a semester left at Middlebury following the conclusion of the internship to qualify. This position is not open to graduating seniors.

StateChange:

StateChange is a  social impact venture mental health media & tech company in Burlington, VT co-founded by career mental health clinicians & applied neuroscience educators.  We bring the science & tools of mental health and resilience to people at scale through digital learning products/tools and community-facing “impact media”: Podcasting, events & youth-facing social media. We use neuroscience, design thinking, implementation science, and principles of universal design, equity, acceleration and social impact strategy to meet the unprecedented moment of mental health with innovative technology & content that transforms mental health into public health for all. CEO Shauna Hill (Middlebury ’99), COO Kate Saraceno (’99) and Nicole Hapeman (Skidmore) are building a media & technology architecture to catalyze the wider population health impact potential of the critically undersized “human being expert” workforce of mental health professionals, educators, health sciences clinicians, researchers and applied neuroscientists. Founded in January 2021, StateChange is in active fundraising and a rapid growth stage as we scale to launch our digital workforce mental health training products into the market & continue our development of models and tools to transform campus & young adult mental health in the higher ed space.  

JOB DESCRIPTION:

As part of our company’s passion for & commitment to intergenerational & collaborative innovation, StateChange seeks to host two (2) students for VIS 2023. We are not looking for one specific set of skills or interest area; we are looking for students who feel energized by our mission & want to contribute to our impact! 

VIS students will have broad exposure to operational & programmatic elements of our business at StateChange. Students will attend meetings, calls, and participate in work teams that involve a variety of business, creative, research or project tasks relevant to general professional skill set development. We are a startup and everyone does a bit of everything here, so there will be some administrative tasks but this is not a place where we have students follow us around and grab coffee. StateChange VIS Students will be given structured supervision, mentorship and planned support across the 8 weeks to maximize student learning and impact potential. Our team will work with you to identify key learning goals for the summer that we will integrate into our workflow and plan for. We LOVE students & emerging professionals and have working with interns for decades!

VIS students will be invited to choose from several potential projects in early development to work on and move forward over the summer. Additionally, students will work together on a new project to engage the Middlebury campus & community more widely in our resilience & mental health impact work, and will lead SC’s visioning and implementation planning for that project. Our team will work with students to develop structured workplans  for individual and team project work. 

Expected activities & tasks:

• Research & briefing🡪 Research content areas will be varied and depend on active need, but could include: clinical/health sciences; public policy; public health; neuroscience; market research;
• Work Process🡪 Meetings & work sessions with SC team members; 1:1 and shared supervision and mentorship; shadowing meetings or calls in areas of student interest or learning goals; administrative & operational tasks as needed (shared by all teammates).
• Project work🡪 Students will be offered a menus of individual and shared project opportunities to dive into and move forward over the summer. 
• Creative/Content creation🡪 Students will be invited to expand their design or multi media production skills or to support our creative work with logistics, copy editing, or other production taks.
• Engagement & Communications🡪 Students will contribute to the development of our engagement strategy, and generally support the SC team and CEO in our community engagement & PR work with tasks execution, planning, writing, editing & content development. 

Students with interests in psychology, neuroscience, social sciences, health sciences, social enterprise and entrepreneurship, design, UX/UI & tech development, environmental justice, social justice, writing & editing, and multimedia production would thrive at StateChange. However, we also understand that students outside these areas have a lot to offer and we are big fans of diverse collaborative teams and mission/passion alignment. Students will need to work independently 1-2 days per week at times, depending on staff schedules, but will always have access to Hula, to our team, and to structured work plans even when SC team members are not on site. StateChange is deeply committed to safe, inclusive and antiracist workplace & whole-person, resilient work culture.