Internship

Internship possibilities include work as an intern in any organization in which you will have an active supervisor who assists in making your time there as constructive as possible. Choose a faculty advisor with whom you are familiar, whose work relates to your interests in being an intern with this organization.

The organization should be closely related to your liberal arts program of study and can be in business or government, or in non-profits such as arts organizations or social service agencies. A community engagement internship with an organization addressing issues such as poverty, hunger, housing, or chronic unemployment would make an especially strong bridge between your liberal arts studies and the local community.

You must meet regularly with your site supervisor; establish a schedule before you begin. Meet at least three times with your faculty advisor, at the beginning, middle, and end of your internship.

Keep a journal of impressions, experiences, and learnings. Conclude the project with a paper organizing those journal entries and other research and reflections into a coherent discussion of your internship.

• Refer to Final Paper Guidelines

60 hours of on-site work are required. (One model for this would be 5 hours per week for 12 weeks, with 3 weeks remaining to complete your paper. Summer terms are only 6 weeks, so you could average 12 hours per week for 5 weeks, with one week remaining to write your paper).

Proposal

Complete the form, obtaining signatures from your site supervisor, your faculty advisor, and the Program Director. Attach to the form a 250-word description of your proposed internship (Word document, 12pt font, double-spaced).

• Explain your choice of placement site.
• Describe what kind of work you want to do in your internship.
• What are your planned learning outcomes? What do you hope to learn? What will you experience and know that is new to you? What will you take away from this internship that will be helpful to your future endeavors?

“At the end of the course, I will …. [follow with bulleted list]”

Final Paper Guidelines

Write an approximately 5,000-word paper (Word document, 12pt font, double-spaced), in a form and style appropriate for graduate-level writing.

• Discuss your interest in taking on this internship.
• Describe your work undertaken during the internship, your work schedule and responsibilities.
• What was successful? What was your best learning experience?
• What was a failure or didn’t go too well? Was there any activity that felt like a waste of time?
• Describe your relationship with your site supervisor.
• What did you learn from your supervisor? What do you wish you had learned?
• What are your learning outcomes at the conclusion of your internship?
• What learnings and experiences are you carrying with you into your future career?
• Describe the connections you see between your learnings from the internship and your learnings from other Liberal Arts Studies courses you have taken. Where does this internship fit in your overall course of study as you look back over your degree program?

Attach a log of hours worked, showing dates and times of work, as well as meetings with the site supervisor.

Provide a copy of your paper to your faculty advisor and the Program Director, who will evaluate your paper as well as your site supervisor’s comments for your LBS 790 grade.