Project. Internship. Job. How going global sparked Shuto Urabe's head start

By Vicki Christian
Fisher College of Business

Shuto Urabe was born and raised for 10 years in Japan before moving to the United States with his family. His affinity for his homeland, bilingual ability and unique perspective on international culture sparked an interest in global affairs that followed him to Ohio State.

During his first year on campus, Urabe was part of Fisher’s Business Honors Living Learning Community, where students live together, take classes together and build connections through programming, service and corporate engagement. It’s also where he learned about the Ohio Export Internship Program (OEIP) from a fellow roommate.

“The program was appealing because I could see all the work that he was doing and how much he was learning,” said Urabe, a rising third-year accounting major and international business minor. “I also liked that OEIP guarantees participants an internship, which can be very difficult to get as a second-year student.”

Fisher and the Ohio Department of Development initially formed OEIP as a strategic partnership to train a global workforce, grow export sales and create jobs for small- to mid-sized Ohio companies. Since its inception in 2012, the program has expanded to the business programs of five academic cohort universities across the state.

As part of the program, students complete an export-focused class during spring semester where they build their global trade knowledge and apply what they’ve learned to a semester-long export consulting project with an Ohio company.

Upon completion of the OEIP course, students participate in a 12-week, paid summer internship helping develop a participating OEIP company’s export strategy.

More than 582 students statewide have completed the OEIP program, expanding exporting knowledge and expertise to 290 Ohio companies and reaching 486 new international markets, distributors or customers. The program has yielded 102 new full-time job positions and 203 internship extensions at participating companies, with over 50 percent of interns accepting an extension offer.

Urabe joined the spring 2026 OEIP class and conducted extensive international market research for Performance Results Plus (PRP), a Columbus-based manufacturer of hydrological equipment used to measure water flows and water quality of rivers and shallow creeks.

During the class, PRP Owner Michael Adkins discovered that Urabe was an accounting major and hired him outside of class to update the company’s accounting books. Urabe saw it as an opportunity to help the company modernize and incorporate technology.

“They are still very analog in how they do some things, that’s why I was hired for the part-time accounting role,” Urabe said. “They were trying to transition their physical order management system into a digital one. I came in and recorded all the orders into Excel and sent all the data to the accounting department for input into software that would then digitize it.”

He ultimately parlayed his working relationship with Adkins and initial accounting work for PRP into a summer internship with the company.

“OEIP students don't really get to choose which company they go to, but I was fortunate in that I already did research on PRP for our project and was working for them already,” Urabe said. “I reached out to the person in charge of assigning students their internships and asked if I could be placed at PRP since I already knew the owner and the business is 15 minutes from my home.”

Urabe served as PRP’s Asia-Pacific market research summer intern, a role in which he explored potential countries and customers in an area of the world with high-demand for hydrological equipment.

“The U.S. is advanced in terms of hydrological technology,” Urabe said. “South Asia has a lot of rain and a lot of bodies of water there, increasing the demand for the equipment PRP offers.”

After researching the market and identifying countries and companies PRP should do business with, he worked with company representatives to market PRP’s products and provided information about becoming a distributor.

If a company was interested, Urabe became a part of the negotiation discussions.

“I joined PRP’s owner Michael Adkins on a company call to discuss details of a contract and distributorship and whether it would be an exclusive partnership,” he said.

He applied classroom knowledge about incoterms, a set of internationally recognized rules which define the responsibilities of sellers and buyers, specifying who is responsible for paying for and managing the shipment, insurance, documentation, customs clearance and other logistical activities, to the contract discussions.

What surprised him was just how social and friendly the conversations were.

“I thought it would be more business professional, less laughing and small talk,” Urabe said. “I learned those things that might look unnecessary are very important to creating a positive mood. If you go straight into a negotiation, there could be a wall that gets put up, but if you get to know each other first it lowers the barrier. Then once you get into the negotiation it's easier to move forward.”

Urabe also found that working for a niche company can make predicting supply and demand difficult.

“It's kind of a business where it's hard to do a lot of strategy,” Urabe said. “Mostly, PRP has to wait for customers to ask to buy their products because it’s difficult to know when the demand will occur. It's usually when governments are doing infrastructure projects and they want to know what the impact will be on the environment.”

One of the highlights of his internship was attending the United States Geological Survey (USGS) conference in Alabama. He was involved in all the prep work for the trade show, including creating a short video displayed in the company’s booth.

“It was really interesting for me because there were several hundred USGS government employees looking at the showcase of the company’s products in the booth,” he said. “Going to a trade show is one of the things in the OEIP class that we suggested to expand PRP’s presence globally and within the government. I didn't think I would be the one attending the actual trade show with the company.”

As an intern, Urabe not only got to see his hard work from his OEIP project come to fruition, the experience helped jumpstart his professional career in global business: PRP hired Urabe as a part-time international market research associate where he’ll be focusing on accounting, sales and marketing for the company while continuing to pursue an accounting-focused degree at Fisher.