Kern County contains over 25,000 small businesses in a wide variety of industries, including over 5,000 businesses with 10+ employees.
Over the past two and a half years, the CSUB Entrepreneurship program has helped bring roughly 60 students together with both small and entrepreneurially-oriented larger businesses for part-time, paid hourly work and full-time positions after graduation, and those students have earned over $400,000 for the work they've done over that time (over $175k for the part-time work and nearly $250k for the full-time positions), and we have new small businesses contacting us to find student help every week!
The CEI internship program will build on this foundation to connect even more students with small business and innovation-related internship opportunities.