Internships

Learning Through Internships

A college athletic team. A popcorn shop. An electronics store. A repair shop. A classroom full of four-year-olds.

Ask our students where they were this week and you'll get a different answer from every one of them. At Big Picture, an internship isn't an elective or a senior capstone. It starts freshman year, and it's how learning happens here.

It Starts With a Question

What do you want to know more about?

That's where an internship begins — not with a list of open slots, but with a student's actual interest, and then the work of finding someone in Nashville who does it.

Students research the organization, write the outreach email, and sit for the interview themselves. Their advisor coaches them through it. Nobody gets handed a placement, because learning how to ask for one is part of what the internship teaches.

Supportive Mentor, Not a Supervisor

Every student is matched with a mentor at their site — a professional who agrees to teach, not just to supervise.

Mentors assign real work and answer the questions a textbook can't. Four times a year, they come to school and sit in the room while their student presents what they've learned to family and advisors.

Our students learn alongside more than 100 community partners across Nashville — in education, information technology, health sciences, the arts, business, agriculture, criminal justice and beyond.

Extraordinary Return-On-Investment

11,439 hours logged in the field last year. $13,000 earned by students in real-world learning. Industry certifications earned on site, alongside the work.

But the real return is harder to put a number on. Our graduates leave with a résumé that has real entries on it, professional references who know their work, and a clear answer to a question most people don't get to test until college: is this actually what I want to do?

Some find out it is. Some find out it isn't — which is just as valuable, and far cheaper to learn at seventeen than at twenty-two.

None of it works without Nashville saying yes. If your organization can host a student, mentor a project, or open a door for someone curious about what you do, we'd like to hear from you. Contact Us