Expanding opportunities in fashion merchandizing: a successful internship programme through an innovative collaboration with The National NeedleArts Association
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Internships are an important part of education in an applied field such as consumer sciences. Within consumer sciences, coursework typical of a fashion merchandizing programme exposes students, often for the first time, to issues of fibre, yarn and textile structure as well as colour and design. While these topics expand student knowledge beyond apparel, students find it difficult to imagine careers outside of the typical fashion merchandizing framework, thus limiting their internship choices to apparel retailing. Most students are unaware of the art and craft markets, specifically the needlearts of knitting, crocheting, needlepoint, cross‐stitching and embroidery. In the United States and Canada alone, this market, which includes fibre and yarn designers and producers, suppliers and retailers, constitutes an $8.5 billion industry. In summer 2006, the University of Akron and The National NeedleArts Association (TNNA), a trade association, initiated a joint venture, coined Pathways into Professional Needlearts (PiPN), to familiarize and train students in the needlearts. During the pilot programme, 10 fashion merchandizing students attended TNNA's trade show, spent 2 weeks in intense needlearts training and completed 10‐week‐long internships. TNNA appealed to its members for internship positions, which were subsequently matched with students’ abilities and expectations. The positions, scattered throughout the United States and Canada, ranged from a summer camp for school‐aged children, a design house for specialty knits, a needlepoint boutique and design business, yarn designers and distributors, to a web site and e‐business to retail boutiques. Both hosts and students benefited from new, and ongoing, business relationships. The enthusiasm for PiPN prompted TNNA to sponsor a second class in 2007. The students reported that they easily transferred their traditional fashion course concepts to their new areas of interest. They were able to apply their knowledge of textile materials, construction techniques, fashion trends, market research and consumer behaviour to both their needlearts course and subsequent internship. Students not only learned the fundamentals of the needlearts, they also gained a new perspective on the possibilities of future careers. Equally important, they experienced the personal fulfilment of self‐expression through artistic media previously not attempted and the relevance of building a community through the needlearts. They also learned that in applying the traditional content of fashion merchandizing to a related industry, they could expand consumer choice by providing a different market perspective.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".