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In a new externship opportunity with Pure Fishing, Leeds and engineering students used AI to streamline business processes and turn data into actionable insights.

At Pure Fishing, the students’ work saved the company enough money to hire five of the externship participants full-time. CEO Dave Allen refers to the company's newest recruits as his “mini AI SWAT team."��

Not many college students get to build data-analysis tools for a major sporting goods company. But thanks to an externship with the largest fishing tackle company in the world, Pure Fishing, students like Samantha Lopes (Mktg’27) leveraged their AI skills to create real-world business solutions.

“This has been one of the best experiences you could ask for as an undergrad for a plethora of reasons, one being there’s a lot of leadership,” she said.

Both students and Pure Fishing have benefited from this partnership. Pure Fishing CEO Dave Allen said that the students’ work has saved the company enough money to hire five of the externship participants full-time. Their newly created positions, which he described as a “mini AI SWAT team,” will address future workflow and process automation problems.��

“There's been a lot of talk about AI stealing people's jobs, and I think it's going to be quite the opposite,” Allen said. “[Students] have a set of skills that are really in need in terms of their usage of AI over the past four or five years that they can leverage to solve problems in an organization.”

Treating students as experts

The first round of the Pure Fishing program ran from May to July 2025, with 15 students from Leeds and ����������’s College of Engineering & Applied Science working in five teams of three to solve business issues related to marketing, product design, sales and more. Pure Fishing employees acted as team leads, checking in with the students weekly. Otherwise, the students, who worked remotely, were afforded as much autonomy as possible.

“[The students] owned the project from the solution standpoint, pretty much from A to Z,” said Associate Teaching Professor Jeremiah Contreras, who co-led the program with Assistant Teaching Professor Al Pisano. “They worked with the business partners who know the business side, but the student teams implemented the tech solution.”

Solving real business problems required flexibility to pivot. Lopes worked on four projects during her two semesters in the externship, starting out in social media metadata and ending up working on point-of-sale data.��

“Every single time it wasn’t like, ‘Oh you failed, you guys suck,’” she said. “It was just like, ‘Oh that’s business. You find things out and you pivot.’ It was nice to have an environment so supportive of change.”

At the end of the nine-week program, the teams presented their solutions at the Pure Fishing headquarters in Charleston, South Carolina. The winning team was then treated to a day of fishing with Allen.��

��If I had a dollar for every time I sat on a conference call and we got off and people said, ‘I can’t believe how smart all these ���������� kids are,’ I’d have a million dollars.��

Dave Allen, CEO of Pure Fishing

Eighteen more students came onboard for the program’s second round in October 2025, including Darby McMullen (Fin’25). McMullen’s team worked on both optimizing product packaging and translating product copy. Throughout the program, McMullen said he was treated like an important contributor.

“It was cool to see how meaningful it was to them,” he said. “Just seeing the way they interacted with us and valued us and respected our ideas.”

Laying the groundwork

Allen first approached Tandean Rustandy Endowed Dean Vijay Khatri about starting an externship program in spring 2025. At the time, the Leeds Advisory Board, on which Allen serves, was looking for a way to prepare students for an AI-driven work world, while Pure Fishing was trying to implement the new technology. To Allen, who has tried to give back to the Leeds community since graduating, partnering with ���������� was a no-brainer.

“It was a little bit of serendipity in terms of timing,” he said.

Khatri then reached out to Contreras, Pisano and the to get the initiative off the ground. While the AI Club’s leadership team recruited students, Contreras and Pisano discussed logistics with Allen and Pure Fishing Vice President of Global Business Development James Malaguez. Once everything was in place, Contreras and Pisano gave the students a crash course in running their own consultancy firm. Then, they took on a more behind-the-scenes role.

“We acted as facilitators, but we really wanted this to be a student-led initiative,” Contreras said.

An experiential learning blueprint

Although Allen plans to continue hiring ���������� externs at Pure Fishing, he hopes the program can act as a blueprint for future experiential learning programs. The success of the externship has already catalyzed this expansion. Darrell Zechman, senior director of Career Development and Experiential Learning, hopes to scale up the number of similar projects available to students.

“The goal is for every single student—whether they're an undergrad student or a grad student—to have the opportunity to participate in either a curricular or co-curricular, consulting-style project,” he said.

A recent transformative gift will help make this a reality. It enabled Leeds to establish the new Nicholas Dante Badami Office for Experiential Learning, which will amplify experiential initiatives, strengthen career outcomes, foster leadership and entrepreneurial mindsets, and ensure professional readiness by partnering with companies to offer these types of opportunities. The Pure Fishing program is a prime example, and the students’ work has left a lasting impression on the company.

“If I had a dollar for every time I sat on a conference call, and we got off and people said, ‘I can’t believe how smart all these ���������� kids are,’ I’d have a million dollars,” Allen said. “These students within our organization, the work that they've done has just been extraordinary.”