What started in 2018 as a small initiative to connect NC State students with meaningful internship opportunities in North Carolina’s rural communities has since grown into a driving force for student career development and rural economic engagement.

The Rural Works! Internship Program, overseen by NC State’s Career Development Center, hit a record high number of interns for Summer 2025, placing 213 students in internships across the state. The program started out with just 19 interns, and has seen major growth in the last four years, offering these students high-impact, hands-on opportunities that occasionally lead to full-time employment.

“Rural Works! came about from collaboration and really everyone amplifying this program,” said Sam Sanger, Rural Outreach Coordinator for the Career Development Center who manages the Rural Works! Internship Program. “You don’t get to 213 [interns] without having phenomenal students who do great things in their internships, and through those students doing fantastic things, it encourages the employers to continue coming back to this program.” 

Rural Works! partnered with 139 employers for Summer 2025, seeing a 35% increase in employer participation from last year. Since the program was born out of NC State’s commitment as a land-grant university to serve the entire state, most notably in areas that are often underserved in traditional recruitment, Rural Works! is able to connect NC State students with employers in rural communities who are eager to bring in fresh perspectives. 

“This is a way to bring in employers and companies from rural North Carolina who haven’t traditionally had the opportunity to recruit from NC State, and then also to give our students at NC State an opportunity to connect with organizations that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to,” Sanger said. “Rural Works! can act as a bridge between those two groups and bring them together to create really amazing internship opportunities.”

And that bridge is working. In addition to the growing student participation, employers are seeing real value from their recruitment of Rural Works! interns. 

“I’ve had companies who have started out with one intern and that intern does phenomenal. They love them. They want to keep them. And then they come back and say ‘This intern we had was so amazing. Can we get three next year? Can we get four?,’” Sanger recalled. “Rural Works! growth has been possible because of the efforts of all groups involved. Employers throughout the state have been engaged and committed, NC State students have provided real world value in their internships, and our university departments have recognized this is a program worth investing in.”

One standout measure of Rural Works!’ success is the growing number of students who have turned their summer internships into full-time careers. Gian Recentes, a 2024 Rural Works! intern at Wieland Copper Products, began his full-time role there in June 2025. He shared that he credits his Rural Works! internship with giving him the critical hands-on experience needed to get through his NC State coursework and the skills needed to help shape his career trajectory. 

“It’s a good experience to go in-depth and learn a lot of hands-on stuff, and I think it’s especially helpful for when you do Senior Design because that’s applying a lot of what you do, and so having that prior hands-on experience from my Rural Works! Internship helped with my Senior Design for sure,” Recentes said. 

He also said that the proximity of the Wieland internship to his hometown and the nature of the work focusing on 3D printing and production processes made Rural Works! a natural fit. 

William Gibson, another NC State engineering alum, now also works full-time at Wieland after his own Rural Works! internship in 2024. Like Recentes, Gibson emphasized the real-world, high-impact nature of the work. 

“The internship and working here full-time are for the most part, pretty similar,” Gibson said. “When I came here last year, they assigned me to these projects and it was autonomy and full responsibility. It wasn’t pushing papers or just doing data entry. I was out on the floor working, helping out. It’s a pretty seamless transition going full-time. You’re just here beyond the summer and you get to see a bit more about the plant and meet more people because now you’re more involved.” 

During his Rural Works! internship, Gibson ended up living on a farm in Stokes County where Wieland Copper Products is located. 

“Coming from a suburb, I had never really been out in a rural area and so I’ve never known what it was like,” he said. “I ended up living on a farm of sorts last year and loved it. I didn’t think I’d ever work out here at someplace like this and I’ve loved it and I’ll probably stay out here… Rural Works! can expose you to a different line of work and also help you figure out more of what you want to do or don’t want to do and those are valuable things.” 

Abdullah Awana, now a Manufacturing Engineer at LS Cable, called Rural Works! a lifeline. After applying to over 150 positions at various companies and hearing nothing back, he found career success through the program.

“Rural Works! gives students a sense of hope and also gives them a platform, an opportunity…,” Awana said. “Rural Works! gave me this opportunity, and frankly, if it didn’t, I don’t know where I would be.” 

Awana also shared that he appreciated the community engagement aspect of Rural Works!, recalling the time he spent volunteering at a hunger shelter during his internship. 

“Through the Rural Works! program, there was a lot about giving back to the community, so we did work at a hunger shelter that inspired me that as an engineer, you’re not just solving machines, you’re also impacting some lives in society,” Awana said.

While the program’s growth is self-evident, Sanger said he believes that this is just the beginning. Rural Works! placed 150 NC State Engineering students out of the 8,200 total undergraduate students in the program, with total undergraduate enrollment at the university around 27,000. 

Besides engineering, other Rural Works! interns were placed through the SECU Public Fellows Internship Program, Business HIRE, and NC State Extension.  

“When you think of 213 interns, that’s a phenomenal number, but we really only scratched the surface of the amount of students who could benefit from this program,” Sanger said. 

“Last year, we had 121 Rural Works! employers, but there are thousands of manufacturers alone in the state of North Carolina, so there are so many more organizations, nonprofits, local governments, and businesses, who could benefit from Rural Works! and I hope that we’re able to continue dominoing it, because, again, I think we have really only scratched the surface” he added. 

Interested in applying for a Rural Works! internship? Explore featured internships or search for opportunities through ePACK once employers begin posting in November 2025. Internships will be available on a rolling basis through March 2026. Reach out to Sam Sanger at swsanger@ncsu.edu for more information.