Helping TWR Interns Cross the Finish Line

In the spring of her junior year at Huntington University in Indiana, Denali Kern had a packed schedule.

In addition to attending classes full time, she was working two part-time jobs, leading a women’s ministry on campus and taking part in student government.

Oh, and in that spring of 2022, she was raising thousands of dollars for her summer internship with TWR.

“I put things off because the stress paralyzed me,” said Kern, now 21, from the dorm where she is serving as a resident assistant in her senior year.

Jennifer Bozeman, TWR’s coordinator of short-term missions and college recruiting, is seeing more intern appointees finding it difficult to reach their support goal in a short time in the midst of busy schedules and often a limited support network, she said.

That’s why TWR has started a fund to help out intern appointees who are struggling with the support-raising process.

The newly established Intern Support Project will provide a fund to help interns who have done all they could but still haven’t quite achieved the needed support to cross the finish line.

It’s not going to be a free ticket, available to all, Bozeman said. An appointee who hasn’t made a serious effort can’t expect help. It will be more of a grant for those who have done the work but still have fallen a little short.

That process can be especially challenging, Bozeman said, for appointees who have come to faith in Christ during their college years.

“If you think about it, they just met Christ, they are growing in their relationship with him, they’re getting involved in a church probably or potentially for the first time,” Bozeman said. “That means they don’t have a huge network.”

That wasn’t an issue for Zeke Hansen. The journalism major at Ball State University in Indiana is a pastor’s son who had believing friends, family and a church home to draw upon. His support-raising process last year went fairly quickly, he said.

But that didn’t mean it was easy.

“It was very intimidating for me,” said Hansen, now 20 and in his senior year.

Like Hansen, Makenna Yergler of the 2021 TWR internship class raised her support in plenty of time. But it was a challenge for her as well.

“I was very nervous and stressed when I first saw the amount I’d have to raise,” Yergler said.

The 2023 interns are raising between $6,000 and $8,000 apiece depending on where they’ll be serving, Bozeman said.

Yergler, now 23, recalls needing to raise close to $7,000 for her engineering internship on the island of Guam two summers ago. Hansen served in communications out of South Africa last summer. Kern, on TWR’s global content team, also did much of her work for Africa, but out of TWR’s U.S. office in Cary, North Carolina.

All three found their internships to be beneficial experiences, they said.

“It just taught me things that I know I will need for my future career and made me comfortable with them,” Kern said.

Both Yergler and Hansen said their overseas experiences stand out on their resumes.

Hansen and Kern both are on track to graduate in May and are exploring their career options. Yergler, who majored in electrical engineering, graduated from Southern Illinois University in December 2021 and began working the next month for Caterpillar. She’s based at their Clayton, North Carolina, operations and lives not far from the TWR U.S. office.

Because her family moved often as she grew up, Kern had a smaller network to draw on in her support-raising than Hansen and Yergler had. She said she knew a certain number of people would offer support, but reaching out to people she hadn’t seen in a long time was uncomfortable.

“It took me longer for that reason,” Kern said. “But really all I had to do was take one step.”

Bozeman insists that intern appointees take those steps and provides the guidance and materials they need to do so. But for those who have made the effort to raise their support, being able to help them cross the finish line is worthwhile, she said.

As interns, they form an important part of TWR’s present and its future. Although none of the three young adults profiled in this article is currently contemplating a future career with TWR, traditionally about 20% of interns end up serving with us down the road in some way, Bozeman said.

“We want to pour into the next generation,” she said. “Because at some point … we’re going to have to pass the baton on to the next generation.”

Learn more about the intern-support project here.

Images: (top, from left) Former TWR interns Alex Tan, Denali Kern and Zoe Schmidt brainstorm at TWR's office in Cary, N.C.;, (middle, right) engineering intern Makenna Yergler stays busy at the Guam workbench as volunteer Mike Metzger helps out.