Eric Klinger

Revised 5/13/2000

ALL ABOUT INTERNSHIPS AND FIELD EXPERIENCES

FOR LAHS AND PSYCHOLOGY STUDENTS

What Are Internships and Field Experiences?

An internship or field experience within Liberal Arts for the Human Services (LAHS) and Psychology consists of professionally supervised activity in a professional setting that offers one or another kind of human service. The kind of activity that counts toward an internship must teach the student something academically valuable about the delivery of human services. Interns observe and assist with the professional activity that goes on around them, and they may themselves engage in professional activities under close supervision. They generally also take part in the everyday organizational activity of the agency within which they work--from coffee breaks to staff meetings--and thereby gain insights into the nature of professional life in such a setting.

Each internship or field experience entails two supervisors. First, there is the UMM faculty supervisor, who works out arrangements for the experience, instructs the student on specific requirements, and awards the grade. Second, there is also at least one field supervisor, a qualified professional in the field setting of the internship who supervises the student's on-site activities and, at the completion of the field activities, sends an evaluation of the student's performance to the faculty supervisor.

At UMM there are two ways to register for an internship. One is to sign up for IS 3996, the "Interdisciplinary Internship." The other is to sign up for Psy4896, "Field Experiences in Psychology." Both kinds of experiences satisfy the description above. There are two differences between them. First, Psy 4896 requires that the activity be supervised in the field setting by a professional psychologist, usually a Ph.D., although psychologists with master's degrees may be approved as well. For IS 3996, the field supervisor may be any qualified human services professional, not necessarily a psychologist. Second, IS 3996 requires students to complete a special contract with their faculty supervisors, and these contracts must be further approved by the Academic Dean. For arranging Psy 4896 at the UMM end, the student need deal only with the faculty supervisor.

Who Has to Take Them? Who May Take Them?

The major in Liberal Arts for the Human Services requires a minimum of four credits in either IS 3996 or in Psy 4896. The psychology major does not require either one. However, any student who meets a faculty supervisor's requirements for one of these courses may enroll in it. Therefore, psychology majors or majors in other fields are welcome to sign up, provided that they are properly prepared for whatever internship they wish to undertake.

For either IS 3996 or Psy 4896, there are no general prerequisites. Your readiness for the internship or field experience depends on an agreement between you and your faculty internship supervisor. However, your faculty supervisor is likely to want a significant amount of relevant preparation. For more on this, see below the section on "When to Take Your Internship."

Purposes of Internships and Field Experiences

Internships and field experiences serve a number of purposes. Their chief liberal-education purpose is to enrich students' learning. They do this by providing concrete experiences with applying knowledge outside an academic context. This enables students to knit up their academic learning with quasiprofessional functioning. They can try out principles they learned in the classroom, laboratory, and readings while these are still fresh in their minds. The hope here is that students will make firm connections between their academic learning and their professional activity--that they will draw on what they learned academically to improve and think critically about their functioning as professionals, and that they will draw on what they learned in the field setting to illustrate, dramatize, test, correct, and reorganize their academic learning.

Internships and field experiences do, of course, also have other purposes. One is to give students a realistic day-to-day experience with life in a profession they are probably thinking about entering. They will have a chance to try it out with minimal cost to their careers before committing themselves to a job in the field. If they decide they would rather do something else, they have lost much less than by quitting or--worse still--keeping a job they dislike.

Internships and field experiences also introduce students into professional networks. They may find a future job in their internship agency or in some other agency they contacted in the course of their internship, or the contacts they developed may help them find a job somewhere else.

Finally, interns' performance in the field setting provides the basis of a competency evaluation. Interns and UMM can see whether they have acquired the knowledge and skills they are expected to acquire.

What are the Possible Choices of Field Settings?

The array of possible field settings is enormous, since it encompasses any human services setting. UMM students in LAHS and psychology have worked in state and community hospitals, residential treatment centers for disturbed adolescents, community mental health centers, school and college counseling services, business and government personnel offices, programs for the mentally retarded, the disabled, and the aged, nursing homes, educational and therapeutic camps, chemical dependency treatment centers, rape and abuse crisis centers, other kinds of crisis centers, and a variety of other human services programs. The list can be as long as students' interests and ingenuity dictate. The only requirements are that the student's activity be arranged to be educationally valuable and that it be supervised closely by a qualified human services professional.

However, not all possible human services activities would qualify. For instance, being an ordinary "counselor" at a summer camp, in which the student's activities are on a largely less-than-professional level, would not qualify. If you are in doubt about whether an idea for an internship would qualify, do not hesitate to ask a prospective faculty supervisor about it.

How to Arrange an Internship or Field Experience

There are two general ways to go about arranging an internship or field experience. One is to locate a setting in which you wish to work, make your own inquiries about the possibilities there, and then enlist the help of a UMM faculty member to finalize the arrangement with the field agency and to set up a suitable set of course requirements for the student. A second, more common route, is to use UMM resources to locate a field setting and to work with UMM faculty and staff to make the necessary arrangements. The UMM Career Center maintains information on internship possibilities. Additionally, UMM faculty associated with the LAHS major generally also have some information about possible settings.

Whichever path you take, be sure to allow plenty of time--generally about half a year--to make arrangements. This means, for instance, that if you wish to take your internship during the summer after your junior year, you should begin to make arrangements during the early part of the previous fall semester.

Paperwork

Registering for an internship in the IS 3996 series requires (1) an internship agreement on printed quintuplicate forms, signed by the student and faculty supervisor and filed with the office of the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs; (2) an accompanying learning contract that spells out the proposed internship in considerable detail, including its objectives, the types of activities to be undertaken, the number of hours allocated to these activities, the total number of hours of learning-engendering activity in the internship, and the method of evaluation; (3) an indication, written or oral, from the field supervisor to the faculty supervisor that the field supervisor approves the student's internship plan and will take responsibility for its supervision and evaluation in the field setting. Printed forms and examples of learning contracts are available from faculty internship supervisors, from the Career Center, and from the office of the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs.

Internships under Psy 4896 require only an agreement between intern and faculty supervisor, the form of which is determined by the faculty supervisor.

When to Take Your Internship

There is no set time when you must take your internship. The most important consideration is your academic readiness to take it. For instance, if you are planning an internship in a psychiatric setting, you should have taken the personality and psychopathology courses (Psy 3301, 3311, 3312, each 2 credits), and helping relationships (Psy 4101) before heading out into the field. If you plan to work with children or adolescents, you should already have taken the appropriate developmental course (Psy 3401, 3402, 3403). If you will be working with adults, especially older adults, it would be well to have taken Psy 3403. And so on. Anybody going into the field would be well advised to have taken Professional Conduct Codes, Legal Constraints, and Ethics in the Human Services, IS 4101.

Since it is hard to take an internship and a full academic course load at the same time if the field setting is located away from Morris, most students take their internships during the summer following their junior year or the summer following their senior year. In the latter case, if the internship is the only requirement left between you and graduation, you can generally arrange to take part in commencement exercises before completing the internship. The actual degree, of course, will be awarded upon completion of all work.

How to Calculate Number of Credits

The rule laid down by the University Senate states that each credit of course work should correspond to three hours of work per week of the semester, including exam week, or 48 total hours of effort per semester. In an average four-credit course, for example, an average student is expected to devote about 192 hours to classes, labs, readings, papers, tests, and any other work in that course. These are, of course, supposed to be hours of educational activity.

Calculating credits for internship and field experiences is more complicated than for on-campus courses, because some time spent in the field is likely to noneducational--for instance, some routine admission procedures or clerical operations may cease to teach an intern anything new after the first few times they are performed. Other activities, such as participating in group therapy or other professional kinds of patient contact, may never cease to be learning experiences, no matter how often repeated.

To calculate the number of credits an internship deserves, therefore, it is necessary to estimate the number of hours of internship activity that will be educational. You then divide that number by 48 to arrive at the appropriate number of credits. Or, conversely, to make sure that your internship is worth four credits, it is necessary to structure the internship to provide the requisite amount of learning time: 192 hours. Your time estimates should include time spent on the required daily log, final paper, and special readings described next.

What Will You Be Required To Do?

The specific requirements for your internship or field experiences will depend on your faculty supervisor and, of course, on the kind of internship setting in which you will be working. However, most internships require the following:

1. a specific plan for field supervision

2. a daily log (“journal”) in which you record your main activities during that day and your thoughts about what you are doing

3. a paper about your internship (see below for details)

4. a satisfactory evaluation by your field supervisor(s)

Note that you are not necessarily required to do new reading or to engage in research. If you have not already acquired the necessary background for your field setting, you may be required to read background material, and, of course, you are always encouraged to read, but a schedule of readings is not a standard part of the internship experience. The point of an internship is to gain experience by doing, not by reading.

You are also welcome to conduct research in your field setting, provided that you have the consent of the authorities at your field setting and of the University's Internal Review Board that passes on all uses of human subjects in research. If you plan to undertake a substantial amount of research, however, you should probably consider signing up for a psychology Empirical Investigation (such as Psy 4630, 4640, or 4650) or a directed study course in addition to IS 3996 or Psy 3920. Then you can do the research under the former course framework and the internship experience under the latter.

Instructions for Writing the Paper

At the end of the internship, you will be required to hand in a paper. The paper should contain two parts.

Part 1 of the paper should describe the kinds of activities you engaged in during your internship and the approximate number of hours you spent on each kind of activity. This part of the paper can be quite short--one or two pages.

Part 2 of the paper should describe the connections you were able to make between your internship experiences and your academic learning: ways in which your academic learning was helpful or misleading to you as you worked, ways in which you were able to apply the principles of psychology, sociology, or other academic disciplines to particular tasks or challenges in the field setting, ways in which you found specific theories or empirical evidence from your academic work to be consistent or inconsistent with particular internship experiences, ways in which particular internship experiences illustrated or contradicted things you had learned in your courses, and so on. For example, if you were working with delinquent adolescents, were you able to apply particular principles of behavior modification, perception, cognition, motivation, or group dynamics? How well did they work? How do you account for the extent to which they worked or failed? What did the experience teach you about psychology? About people? About yourself? Part 2 of the paper should be long enough to show that you succeeded in the main educational goal of the internship: to apply knowledge and to knit up academic learning with field experiences. It will normally be between 5 and 15 double-spaced typed pages.

One way to go about writing Part 2 is to review your notes and texts from your basic LAHS courses (psychology, sociology, anthropology, speech, etc.) and match up topics with the various topics and activities that come up in you journal. Then think about their relationships and write down your thoughts.

What is the point of making these connections? On the one hand, of course, they are intended to deepen and elaborate your academic learning. But they are also intended to help protect you from what too often happens to people in the field: They compartmentalize academic learning from professional practice, ignore the former (and thereby lose its power) in dealing with the latter, and eventually end up relying just on their own insights and intuitions without benefit of the relevant science, which they then soon forget. You wouldn't want your physician to treat you just on the basis of her or his own personal experiences and intuition without benefit of medical science, and there is no reason to want human services personnel to do that, either.

Grading

All internships and field experiences are graded on the S-N system only. To obtain a grade of S, all aspects of your work must be satisfactory--your daily log, your paper, and your field supervisor's evaluation of your work. Doing beautifully on one or more of these measures will not compensate for failure on another.

The Field Supervisor's Role

Internships would be impossible without the conscientiousness and dedication of field supervisors, for whose efforts UMM is deeply grateful. The field supervisor is a professional employed at the site of the internship who provides day-to-day supervision of the intern's activities. Such supervision normally consists of frequent consultations between supervisor and intern. In some instances, the official field supervisor may delegate part of the most direct, daily supervision to another appropriately qualified professional working under her or his direction and provide less frequent (for example, weekly) feedback to the intern. In those instances, the official field supervisor remains responsible for the educational quality of the internship experience for the intern. At the end of the internship, the field supervisor supplies a written evaluation of the intern's performance to the faculty supervisor.

Field supervisors must be qualified professionals in the area of the internship. "Qualified" here means having the academic credentials and experience that are generally recognized as necessary to qualify an individual to hold the supervisor's professional position. For example, for positions designated as being for professional psychologists, this means state licensure or at least a master's degree in psychology (full qualification normally requires a doctorate, but there are many exceptions) plus at least three years of supervised practice; for positions designated as being for social workers, full qualification consists of state licensure or an MSW plus some years of supervised experience, but, again, there are exceptions; and so on for other professions. Generally speaking, long, successful, supervised experience may substitute for academic credentials for purposes of these undergraduate internships.

The field supervisor's final written evaluation of the intern's performance should address the basic question of how well the intern satisfied the supervisor's expectations‑-how well the intern performed her or his professional duties, compared to reasonable professional standards for individuals with the student's level of preparation. Field supervisors are encouraged but not required in this written evaluation to characterize the intern's performance as fully as possible, commenting on the intern's work style, including its particular strengths and weaknesses.

We wish you the best possible internship!