What are Internships and Field Experiences?
An internship or field experience consists of a professionally
supervised activity in a professional setting. The kind of activity
that counts toward an internship must teach the student something
academically valuable about their major or minor. Interns
observe and assist with the professional activity that goes on around
them, and they may themselves engage in professional activities
under close supervision.
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 at least one field
supervisor, a qualified professional in the field setting of the
internship who supervisors 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.
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 the student 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 draw on
what they learned in the field setting to illustrate, dramatize,
correct, and reorganize their academic learning.
Internships and field experiences do have other purposes.
One is to give students a realistic day-to-day experience with life
in a profession they are possibly 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.
How to Arrange and 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.
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
the following:
(1) an internship agreement form, which is available on
our website, signed by the student and faculty supervisor and approved
by the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs;
(2) an accompanying learning contract that spells out the
proposed internship in considerable detail including the goals and
objective, the types of activities to be undertaken during the field
experience, the number of hours allocated to these activities, the
total number of hours of learning activity in the internship, location
of the internship and organization name, city and state;
(3) the academic experience should included a daily journal
of his/her activities and a final paper, which will be required
based on the reading that he/she did and from knowledge of what
was gained from the internship experience. This paper will meet
all of the criteria of a regular research paper and will be turned
in by the dated required by the Faculty member. The student may
also be required to read the equivalent number of scholarly books
in the subject area and may be required to give an oral presentation
of what was gained from the internship experience;
(4) notification will be sent from the field supervisor
to the faculty supervisor indicating that the field supervisor approves
the student's internship plans and will take responsibility for
the student's supervision and evaluation in the field setting. Arrangements
should be made to have a letter of evaluation sent from the internship
supervisor to the faculty advisor upon conclusion of the internship.
Forms are available from the Career Center, and from the
office of the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs.
When to Take Your Internship
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 the commencement exercises before completing the internship. The
actual degree 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 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 be non-educational -- 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 may never cease to be learning
experiences, no matter how often repeated.
Therefore, to calculate the number of credits an internship
deserves, 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
experience will depend on your faculty supervisor and 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 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
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. You are always
encouraged to read, but a schedule of reading is not a standard
part of the internship experience. The point of an internship
is to gain experience by doing, not by reading. Nevertheless,
credit is awarded for the intellectual and academic benefits
that accrue to the student. Consequently, intellectual reflection
on the activity is a core value of the internship. The doing
of the work carries its own rewards. The reflection on the
activity demonstrates the academic impact.
You are also welcome to conduct research in your field
setting, provided you have the consent of the authorities at your
field setting.
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: 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 may be quite
short -- one or two pages.
Part 2: 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 your academic discipline to particular tasks or challenges
in the field setting, ways in which you found specific theories
or evidence from your academic work to be consistent or inconsistent
with particular internship experience, ways in which particular
internship experiences illustrated or contradicted things
you had learned in your courses, and so on.
One way to go about writing Part 2 is to review your notes
and texts from your basic courses and match up topics with
the various topics and activities that come up in your journal. Then think
about their relationships and write down your thoughts. What
is the point of making these connections? They are intended
to deepen and elaborate your academic learning.
While there need not be a direct relationship between the
quality and value of written work and the length of that work, in
general projects of greater scope and complexity should require
longer essays. Consequently the following is a rough guideline on
the length of paper to be produced following the internship:
1-6 credits 15
pages
7-9 credits 20
pages
10-12 credits 25
pages
13 or more credits 30 pages
Grading
All internship 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
the failure of 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. Generally, long, successful, supervised experience
may substitute for academic credentials for purposes of 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.
