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The purpose of this paper is to explore the strategies and an effective model for creating and implementing a sustainability internship program at a university campus.

This study assessed Western Michigan University’s sustainability program’s interns’ gain of environmental knowledge on sustainability topics via pre- and post-test assessments. A sample of 50 interns between fall 2016 and spring 2019 comprising six cohorts participated in this study. Data were analyzed using statistical package for social sciences to calculate descriptive statistics and sign tests.

The sign tests of the accumulative internship pre- and post-test assessment scores significantly increased for all 14 sustainability knowledge dimensions.

The pre- and post-test assessments of the internship program are unable to track and predict the long-term behavior changes of the interns after the completion of the program. Therefore, a future longitudinal study is needed.

This sustainability internship program’s content and experiential learning model has been proven to be effective in increasing interns’ knowledge of sustainability issues and creating sustainability stewards. Institutions and universities should consider creating their own sustainability internship program based on Western Michigan University's program using pre- and post-test assessments as a method of evaluation.

The internship programs’ main strength is that it offers students from all academic backgrounds an opportunity to dig deep into sustainability issues, build new social networks, gain knowledge, develop leadership skills, become sustainability stewards and immediately apply what they have learned on campus and in their local community. On-campus internships are unique learning opportunities worthy of study and refinement.

This research paper is unique because it analyzes the combined pre- and post-test scores of six cohorts of interns’ across multiple knowledge dimensions of sustainability. This study empirically shows that the combined interns’ sustainability knowledge across all dimensions significantly increased from the pre- to post-test over the semester-long program.

While considerable critical energy has been devoted to unmasking the figure of the heroic entrepreneur, the idea that entrepreneurs are unique individuals with special abilities continues to be widespread in scholarly research, social media and popular culture. The purpose of this paper is to traverse the fantasy of the heroic entrepreneur by offering a reading of Richard Branson’s autobiography, Losing My Virginity.

The theoretical approach of this paper is informed by Slavoj Žižek’s concept of fantasy and his critical analytical strategy of “traversing the fantasy”. Žižek offers a theoretical framework that allows us to understand how narratives of famous entrepreneurs create paradoxical fantasies that produce desire.

By offering a reading of Richard Branson’s autobiography, Losing My Virginity, this paper serves to illustrate how the fantasy of the heroic entrepreneur creates the injunction to overcome oneself and become true to oneself, but also how this figure is ridden with contradictions and impossibilities. Branson’s book will eventually be shown to be a religious narrative, where the entrepreneur is responsible for redeeming the crises not only of the economy, but of being as such.

Rather than striving towards a processual approach that lays emphasis on the collective effort involved in entrepreneurship, this paper critically engages directly with the heroic entrepreneur by exploring how this figure is a fantasy that structures desire. This paper shows how critical entrepreneurship studies could benefit from an approach that analyses how the cultural representation of business celebrates the heroic entrepreneur as a source of value creation. The authors further argue that it is the contradictions and impossibilities embodied in the figure of the heroic entrepreneur that carry its far-reaching appeal.