The people accountable for this.

Maryland's defense corridor has never been short of work. It has been short of a way in.

Every one of us had the same two conversations on repeat. On one side, engineering leads and hiring managers saying they could not find people - not senior people, people. On the other, students finishing good technical degrees a short drive from some of the most interesting work in the country, being told they needed experience to get a job and a job to get experience. Both sides were right, and neither could fix it alone.

What was missing was not talent or willingness. It was a route: something structured enough that a company could say yes without inventing a program from scratch, and real enough that a student came out the other side with work they could point at rather than a summer of shadowing.

So we built one. Two rotations at two different host employers, so an intern sees more than one way a company solves a problem. Real assignments with a named mentor, because being handed something that matters is what makes a person decide this is their industry. Industry credentials along the way, so what they earn here is legible to the next employer whether or not that employer is one of ours.

The contractors who founded this put their names to it before there was anything to show - no track record, no alumni, no page like this one. They took students on trust. That is the part we do not intend to forget, and it is why their names sit at the top of the partners page.

None of us do this instead of our day jobs. We do it because the alternative is watching the same two conversations happen again next year, and the year after that, in an industry that will need these people long after any of us have stopped working in it.

Dondre M. Lawson
Founder, Defense Interns Corp