Pathways in Spectroscopy: Connecting Students to Valuable Internships

Mary Kate Donais, who is a Professor at St. Anselm College, has served in many roles over the course of her career. Because of her experience in industry, government, and now academia, Donais has a professional background that few spectroscopy experts have.¹ Her experiences allowed her to gain insights into these different career paths, which made her well-equipped to once serve as an internship coordinator while in academia.

In this “Pathways in Spectroscopy” clip, Donais talks about the strategy in connecting students with relevant internship opportunities.

Spectroscopy: You previously served as the internship coordinator in your department. Could you discuss the strategy behind connecting students to the most relevant, valuable opportunities, and how students can best leverage internships into full-time offerings?

Mary Kate Donais: Social media platforms like LinkedIn are becoming more and more important, so encouraging students to establish their presence through LinkedIn by documenting their skills and posting that they're looking for an internship is part of the strategy. Once they do that, they share it with me, and then I put their post out to my network to help them and connect them with possible employers.

Many of our students are looking for internships local to the general Boston and New England area. It's where a lot of our students come from, so trying to connect them with people in my network helps. The issue is that finding a job these days is hard enough, let alone an internship, so connecting them with some of my network and encouraging them to try to use their family and friends’ networks, is where a lot of these positions come from. It's really hard to get a position from one of those posted jobs that go on to Handshake, or whatever employment system you're using, a lot of it is instead those direct connections. It gives you a little bit of a leg up if you know someone at the company, but really any internship opportunity that provides some aspect of growth can be beneficial.

For our forensic science majors, as an example, finding a forensic internship can be challenging, because a lot of forensic laboratories can't hire students to actually do analyses on evidence because it's connected to criminal cases. The criminalists are doing that work, and they're the people that are employed by that laboratory, but our students have still been able to find positions at some of those places because they're doing other things. Sometimes, it's finding a job at a local water analysis laboratory. It might not be the pharma company that they envision they'll be at when they graduate, but they're still picking up great laboratory skills such as sample preparation and solution preparation, and even soft skills like working with colleagues and in a group and communicating and documenting data well. Those are all going to set them up nicely, so students should be flexible and take whatever opportunities they can find.

This is the first part of our conversation with Donais. She and her team published an archaeometry paper several years ago, and it is listed under “Further Reading” for easy access.²

Reference

(1) Saint Anselm College, Mary Kate Donais. Anselm.edu. Available at: https://www.anselm.edu/about/campus-directory/mary-kate-donais (accessed 2026-06-02).

Further Reading

(2) Jackson, M.; Perrelli, D.; Shelley, J. T.; Donais, M. K. An Archaeometric Investigation into the Former Cataract House Hotel via Elemental Analysis. Spectrosc. Suppl. 2022, 37 (s11), 12–16. DOI: 10.56530/spectroscopy.sh9983a2