After striking out at career fairs aimed at older and graduating students, then-first-year student Henry Franklin tried a retro approach to the job hunt: letter writing. A missive to Rick Siger, Pennsylvania secretary of community and economic development, panned out with a summer internship in the Department of Community & Economic Development’s Office of International Business Development, where Franklin worked with a small team in the state capital in Harrisburg.
Franklin, an economics and cinema studies major from Yardley, Pennsylvania, spent his time shadowing teams, researching, writing reports, working on Gov. Josh Shapiro’s 10-year economic plan, and learning about business and international relations.
The office works with more than 600 Pennsylvania companies per year, helping them find international distributors for their goods and facilitating international business investment in Philadelphia, says David Briel, deputy secretary. “It’s everything from licensing technologies, cement manufacturers, industrial machinery, and hardwood products up to technology.”
Franklin, who hopes to earn an advanced degree in economics, says he was drawn to the discipline early on, attracted to its logic. “A lot of academic disciplines are like an autopsy,” he says, with a lot of people gathered around trying to figure out what went wrong. Economists are collaborative social scientists that use data to solve problems in real time, he says.
During the summer, Franklin learned he enjoyed working with a small team and that connections are made at social events, whose impact he may have previously downplayed. One highlight of Franklin’s internship was accompanying Briel to a conference at the Philadelphia Union League with U.S. ambassadors from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, including Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Brunei. For Franklin, the biggest challenge was to remain himself in such company, he says.
Franklin has a keen sense of U.S. and world history and “knows those things backward and forward,” Briel says, “more than 99% of the population. He’s inquisitive about what’s coming through the front door.”
To excel in the field, Briel says, “it takes someone who has significant international knowledge, as well as knowledge of economics and political science, can talk intelligently about what’s going on from Germany to Australia and knows the players, has spent time internationally, and writes well. Someone who wants to learn but comes in with an incredible base of knowledge and isn’t shy about asking.”
Now in his second year at Penn, Franklin is taking courses in economics, statistics, screenwriting, and philosophy, as well as learning Dutch and serving as program manager for the cinema studies program at Gregory House. “I am, in my heart,” he says, “a humanities student as well.”
