Zlatinka Blaber is an Associate Professor of Accounting in the Bertolon School of Business (BSB). Having studied or taught in her native Bulgaria, France, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States, Blaber understands the employment struggles that many students face. To solve this age-old paradox, Blaber integrates Riipen.com experiential learning projects into her courses, enabling students to gain real-world, work-based experience. Riipen (pronounced as if describing how fruit grows on the vine) is a global, online platform where faculty match with industry professionals who are seeking students to work on their humanities, science, or business ventures.
Riipen is where homework meets real work. The platform bridges the gap between experience and employment, affording students hands-on learning and tangible work products to tout in job interviews and showcase on their résumés. Riipen’s innovative, high-impact, professional, whole-class micro-internship opportunities promote skill development and teamwork among students, while flexibly fitting student schedules as teams collaborate online.
A robust teaching tool for faculty, Riipen, gives students direct, practical experience working in their field, while also supplying businesses with talent, ideas, and insights on projects needed to advance. Recently, for example, Blaber’s five undergraduate and graduate classes worked on accounting-related projects with: 1) a pet care startup from Canada, 2) a Canadian ginseng farm and energy drink manufacturer, 3) a financial planning game startup from Texas, 4) a financial consultancy firm from California, 5) a social enterprise startup from Canada, and 6) a Canadian company developing a personal finance planning SaaS Web application with a companion mobile App. Students interacted with the company representatives directly, learning from them through feedback on their work.
Riipen.com is Taking Root
The Bertolon School of Business (BSB) adopted this experiential learning platform in recent years, as Riipen is growing on more BSB faculty. Faculty members across the Salem State community can also adopt class projects, using Salem State’s private Riipen portal, i. e., projects that Salem State educators and administrators find via alumni, local and international small, medium-size, or big businesses, and not-for-profits, to name just a few. Building on that success, Blaber and SSU faculty colleagues, Youqin Pan, Van Pham, and Manish Wadhwa were awarded a university strategic grant for FY25 to expand Riipen internships and real-world projects across the university. Now, students are engaged in these global, real-world ventures across Accounting & Finance, Computer Science, Management, and Marketing & Decision Sciences courses.
Blaber’s students are engaged in three such endeavors. One of her accounting classes is developing a business plan for a start-up company in Botswana, where the company is making jewelry and auto parts with 3D printers. In addition, students are exploring opportunities and threats for a Canadian company installing EV chargers next to highways and in parking lots and garages, in another of her classes. While Blaber’s graduate class is helping a London-based venture-tech start-up to transition to a venture Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). The firm would like to fund Blockchain-based companies.
Riipen is faculty-led. Once a match between a class and an industry partner’s project is established, faculty and Riipen industry partners use the portal to share information about the company, the tasks required from the learners to do, and the skills students will gain from working on the project. Students in Blaber’s courses spend about 15 hours each on their Riipen endeavors, working collaboratively in teams as part of their semester grade. Thus, Riipen facilitates equity and inclusion in terms of building employability for everyone enrolled in a class. Students can also earn micro-credentials, such as Riipen badges, through completing one or several Riipen projects.
The World Has Become One Global Village
Blaber’s students are entering in collaboration not only with domestic and foreign business entities, but also with non-U.S. students and instructors. Blaber is one of almost four dozen Salem State faculty who have adopted collaborative online international learning (COIL) projects in their courses. For example, two of Blaber’s courses in Spring 2025 are engaged in collaborations with Yarmouk University students in Jordan. Additionally, her graduate class is participating in COIL with an international relations and diplomacy class from Universitas Bina Mandiri Gorontalo in Indonesia. Through COIL activities, students in cross-country teams are tasked with a project to research, prepare, and present in English. In the last few years, Blaber and her students joined faculty and their classes from Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Japan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Thailand, and Ukraine to work jointly on COIL projects.
In 2023-2025, Professors Blaber and Pan were sub-contractors of a $16,000 federal grant for their participation in the Harnessing Innovation through Virtual Exchange for Enhanced Results (HIVER) Program of the Stevens Initiative/Aspen Institute of the U.S. Department of State. Classes from Salem State collaborated with classes from Helwan University in Cairo, Egypt and Yarmouk University, Jordan. In one class, Blaber’s students worked with Helwan University students from a sustainable architecture class, where the Helwan students designed sustainable buildings, while the Salem State students developed plans for the green financing (hypothetical) of the buildings’ construction using the Bloomberg terminals on campus.
Blaber’s scholarship and her own experience in studying and teaching in various countries have demonstrated to her the impact of powerful driving forces, such as internationalization, automation, and sustainability, on career progression, education, and commercial success. She often thinks about the state of the planet that the next generations will inherit from us. “Why do everything possible to achieve profitability in business if we are only going to pollute the environment along the way?” she asks. Blaber feels strongly that business must be responsible to society and value environmental, social, and governance (ESG) sustainability. She regularly offers her students the opportunity to earn the Bloomberg ESG certificate through their classwork. This award is yet another credential to enhance student employability.
As business strives to reduce costs and maximize efficiencies, while keeping quality high, Blaber describes how corporate jobs often migrate to jurisdictions where the cost of labor and materials is low. She asserts that students in the West can benefit from developing a global mindset by learning a foreign language, engaging in international collaboration, and deepening their awareness of different cultures. In her view, working or studying abroad, at least for some time, can be a worthwhile path to career advancement and to personal development. Consequently, Blaber believes that participating in COIL projects and using online portals, such as Riipen and the