High School Senior Completes Internship with Hood Marketing Office

The Division of Rehabilitation services (DORS) is a program that seeks to help students gain real-world, work-based learning experience. Federally funded, and with close association to many public schools, DORS has offices in several Maryland counties and works to secure job experience for students with disabilities. This is valuable because these students might otherwise struggle with the process of gaining employment.

DORS does this by first seeking out specialty agencies.These agencies then have an agent assist students in finding a job or internship, in accordance with their personal interests and skills. This process is not difficult for a rather simple reason: DORS pays for the new employee’s wages, taking the burden of financing off the employer and placing it on the organization instead. As such, there is much demand for what DORS provides. It usually only takes a few weeks for the agent to find a job suitable for the student.

Court Dudek, M.A.’23, is one of these agents. Originally from New Jersey and having graduated from Hood College with a master’s degree in humanities, Dudek is passionate about philosophy, art, literature, history and religion. He has a background in English and writing, but a lack of options combined with a personal desire to support other people led him to become a job coach. Now working for Penn-Mar Human Services, he is often in association with DORS, helping those who stand to benefit from the program. It is his job to aid students and to get them the work experience they need. When it comes to students under the umbrella of DORS, he is very successful at finding them work.

Without the assistance of DORS, however, Dudek claims that it is much harder to find jobs. Employers will often be hesitant to take chances on hiring, training and paying new employees, especially those with disabilities. Finding a job for adults who may have not worked in a long time, or at all, can be a challenge. Despite this, he explained that seeing someone he helped find a job interview that leads to employment is a deeply rewarding process on a personal level.

Recently, the government has been trying to better support adults who have not entered the workforce, and programs offering “adult learning experiences” are gaining more traction. Regardless, DORS is very helpful to young people such as myself. As a high school student, it is due to the DORS program—and Court Dudek—that I am given the opportunity to complete an internship at the Office of Marketing and Communications at Hood College.

At Hood, I am given many tasks of varying levels of challenge, but it is not the work itself which is the most interesting to me. Rather, I am here to gain knowledge: on the workings of this place, the people within it and the importance of that which they accomplish. I hope to one day apply the skills I gain here to a job which I aspire to, most of which have to do with the scribbling of words. Editing, fiction, technical writing—I think I’ll just be happy to write, and this internship will help me develop the skills required to do so.