Our students have great answers to the age-old start-of-school question of “How did you spend your summer?” 

Stephen Hirschel is an adult student studying Computer Information Systems. After working 20 hours per week as an intern for Shift Capital during the spring semester, the company was so impressed they brought him on full-time over the summer. 

“My bosses have given me a lot of encouragement to incorporate the skills I am learning in my degree program into my internship work, and I was even able to merge an important task with my CIS213 final project,” said Hirschel. “They needed their entire old website backed up before they shut it down, and I wrote a script that crawled the entire site and automatically downloaded each page as a PDF file into a folder tree that mirrored the website's file structure. Scripts I have written have created a lot of efficiency on the back end of our website.” 

Shift Capital is a real estate developer that is one of the ownership groups on the SouthWorks project, reclaiming an old industrial site in Ithaca's South Hill. It’s a project that has gained a lot of attention in Ithaca, and Hirschel has been very involved.

“I have been doing a lot of work with event planning, budgeting, blog writing, file organization, and artist facilitation on site as well,” said Hirschel. He even helped with a book launch with TC3 photography professor Harry Littell. “Professor Littell has been SouthWorks' artist in residence for the last year, and his book Factory Stories is a culmination of the work he's done on site. He interviewed former factory employees and combined those first-hand accounts with photography of the abandoned site. It's truly an amazing book.”

Hirschel came back to school in fall of 2025 after working most of his adult life in the food industry. He is studying computers and describes his experiences on campus as phenomenal, but he also knows the value of saying yes to opportunities to do new things.

“This internship has been important to me because I recognized the need to get office experience on my resume. As a former chef seeking a career change through my degree program at TC3, I want to show I'm capable in environments outside of the kitchen, while also utilizing the soft skills and work ethic my old career has instilled in me,” said Hirschel. “I have I also have fallen in love with SouthWorks' mission of turning an old, abandoned factory into a thriving neighborhood. I think there's a beautiful metaphor in that for me as I have embarked on this new path.”