Daniel Soutter learned a lot of skills this summer that went beyond his internship job description.

Soutter, a junior from Wake Forest, North Carolina, came up with a new equipment design, spent time on field work and traveled out of state as a product development engineer intern at Wind Solutions, a Sanford-based company that makes wind turbine parts.

This was the second internship he found through Rural Works!, an NC State University program that connects students to employers in rural communities through paid summer internships.

“I have seen the benefit of working in a manufacturing place in these rural areas,” he said. “Everybody wants to go work for a big firm, but it’s so cool that I was able to go to the shop floor and go see the products actually being physically made.”

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Manufacturing Networks

Rural Works! started in 2018 with four students. In 2025, 145 students worked in 43 counties at 81 companies in industries including electric, aerospace and renewable energy. Over seven years, more than 500 College of Engineering students have participated.

The organizations are often small, with fewer than 50 employees. Employers pay student interns a minimum of $15 per hour. To ensure engineering students are paid wages comparable to those offered by larger or urban companies, the College of Engineering adds a stipend to make total pay equivalent to $25 per hour.

“The students love it,” said Phil Mintz, who is the executive director of Industry Expansion Solutions (IES) at NC State. “The companies love it. There are graduates taking jobs in rural areas because they had this experience.

“Not being able to get an engineer in a factory in rural areas is a workforce issue that we hear about all the time,” he added. “There is an opportunity here for the companies to talk to students about what they want to do, give them something to do in the community. We have an interesting group of students coming out now and they want to do more in the community.”

Hiring engineers in manufacturing fields remains a top priority for rural employers. Through Rural Works!, NC State was one of the first universities to try to meet rural employers’ needs and address the shortage of engineers in these areas.

“These work experiences are important for students as they think about what their careers look like, but equally important is the program’s goal to build students’ understanding of the advantages of living and working in rural areas,” said Jerome Lavelle, associate dean of academic affairs at the College of Engineering.

“Growing up as a farm kid in a rural county in Ohio, the Rural Works! program has special meaning to me,” said Lavelle. “I understand both the beauty and the challenges that such communities face.”

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A Study In Community

When long-time industrial extension specialist Phil Mintz decided to start working on his Ph.D. in leadership studies at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Rural Works! became a natural focus.

Mintz is the executive director of NC State’s Industry Expansion Solutions (IES), which helps match students with rural companies.

“When [Rural Works!] was actually started, I thought, this might be an interesting study at some point,” Mintz said. “I’ve always wanted to complete my Ph.D.”

Mintz collected data from NC State and from peer universities with similar programs that connect students with meaningful work-based learning.

He found that students’ biggest concerns aren’t about salary, which surprised him. Instead, students worry about their social networks and doing engaging work.

“Just getting them there is not enough,” he said. “They want to be engaged, and they want to make a difference beyond their job, and that can happen in rural areas as well as urban areas, but it’s going to still take some commitment by leaders in the communities.”

Mintz has spent his career engaging with manufacturers and coming up with solutions to workforce issues. He found that students with experiences in rural communities — including through Rural Works! — were more likely to consider career opportunities in rural areas.

“People expect universities to do more things like this and not just focus on academics,” Mintz said. “They want to see universities do things that support societal issues more. [Rural Works!] represents something like that, which is kind of unique.”

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Rural Returns

Soutter, the junior mechanical engineering student, is one of many NC State students who find themselves interested in returning to the rural areas they’ve gotten to know.

At Wind Solutions, Soutter made a tangible impact on the company’s work. While the company is headquartered in Sanford, it makes parts for wind turbines all over North America, so Soutter took a trip to the rural community Algona, Iowa, to gain field experience replacing parts.

“They put me right into it all summer,” Soutter said. “The biggest thing I did was redesign presses.”

The press is used for busbars that go on various mechanical elements, from solar panels to wind turbines. With feedback from the Wind Solutions team, he created a new design.

“This new machine makes it so that it is almost impossible to hurt yourself as an operator,” he said.

Hands-on experiences like Soutter’s are what bring students back to rural areas, either for new internships or full-time positions.

“It gave me a brand new perspective on what engineers actually do,” said junior mechanical engineering major RayShaun Williams, who interned at Schindler Elevator Corporation in his hometown of Clinton, North Carolina, in 2024. “It’s different to be in class and have an idea than to actually be in the field, where you see how important the work is.”

Casey Olson ‘21, engineering improvement specialist with IES, completed her Rural Works! internship in Smithfield, North Carolina, in the summer of 2021. After graduating with her degree in industrial and systems engineering later that year, she returned to the company for a full-time position.

“I had multiple job offers before graduating that I would not have been able to get without Rural Works!,” she said. “I ended up creating and negotiating a job at the company where I did my internship. Without doing that internship, that job would not have existed.”