Why internships are important to colleges

Learning about general workplace culture can teach you how to maintain good relationships with future coworkers and how to communicate effectively with upper management to make changes or ask for guidance. Find jobs. Company reviews.

Find salaries. Upload your resume. Sign in. Finding a Job. Why is an internship important? Tests industry knowledge Helps you figure out your interests Creates new interests Connects you to industry professionals Allows you to learn in a safe environment allows you to get paid to learn Provides possible credit for your college degree Allows you to potentially gain more internship opportunities Creates a unique travel experience Inspires you to learn more about an industry Teaches you about the importance of work-life balance Introduces you to office politics.

Tests industry knowledge. Helps you figure out your interests. Creates new interests. Connects you to industry professionals. Allows you to learn in a safe environment.

Allows you to get paid to learn. Provides possible credit for your college degree. Allows you to potentially gain more internship opportunities. Why are they such a big deal? Read on to find the answers. Depending on your individual experience, an unpaid internship may be the first time in your life you find yourself working just for the sake of learning and doing a good job. The importance of internship experience comes from the skills you build and the improvements you make to your resume.

Internships are your way to show your commitment to professionalism, self-improvement, and excellence. They are one of the most important factors in making yourself appealing in the job market. Internships show an employer that you made the most of your education and spent your free time outside of class on experiential learning. But what is it, exactly, that you get from an internship that is so worthwhile?

Internships grant you exposure to the inner workings of your chosen industry. They let you behind the scenes to get a taste for the specific knowledge and everyday practices that every job requires.

One description mentions a specific learning goal, critical analysis. However, in one case the connection to academics is optional, and in another case there is no mention of academics at all. This comparison underscores the point that internships can easily vary even before a student takes a step to become involved in one.

It also suggests that whether an internship is high impact may depend as much on the standard that an institution sets for those engaged in developing internships. Feedback for improvement and the development or refinement of learning goals is also essential. What distinguishes an intern from a volunteer is the deliberative form of learning that takes place. The CAS standards emphasize that an internship should be framed and developed as a learning activity.

The quality of internships also is affected by how well the experience is developed and implemented. Students perform service on their own time; they find jobs and even internships independently of their academic studies.

To apply knowledge productively in field-based settings, all students should experience in-depth questioning from faculty, staff, and other mentors about their assumptions, analyses, conclusions, and actions.

Learners also need both guidance and feedback, from mentors and peers, as they probe the facets of a complex issue and test their own insights against both theory and the experiences of others. What then, can campuses to do better ensure that internships are integrated into the curricular experiences of students? Strengthen how internships are defined. Not all campuses or academic departments will require internships of their students or offer course credit for all internships that students complete, and this is not an argument for that to occur.

Moreover, students also can be asked to articulate their learning and career development from internship experiences—credit or noncredit—through an e-portfolio or some other mechanism designed to help them to integrate the variety of classroom and nonclassroom based experiences they will have in college. What is critical is to have students enter a process where faculty, staff, and peers ask them to reflect, challenge their assumptions, test theories, and make connections across different sites of learning.

Distinguish between learning goals and career development goals—and include both. Again, as witnessed in some of the campus definitions, internships can be framed in a way that speaks very little to what college learning could and should take place through the activity. At the same time, this internship or internship course can and should also have a set of career development goals. These could include clarification of work-related interests and values; exposure to several types of work settings within an industry; the development of contacts in a particular field; or the creation of work samples that can be shared with future employers.

By , asked whether they were satisfied with their major after having been in the world of work or graduate school for a few years, only 40 percent were satisfied. And graduating seniors tend to say that they learned the least about the skills they perceive may help them the most when it comes to getting jobs.

Why is there so little focus on career development in an academic discipline? The article continued:. The [ASA] has just released a resource guide for departments on helping their students get ready for jobs. The guide and the discussion about it here dealt with a mix of packaging vs.

It reveals a common reaction in academia against anything that smacks of vocationalism or apprenticeship. Yet internships organized as learning activities can also encourage application of sociology concepts and methods to complex problems, critical thinking, strong communication and interpersonal skills, and personal and social responsibility. The fact is that the vast majority of undergraduate majors will not go on to become PhDs in an academic discipline; they will become editors, branch managers, research analysts, correspondents, lawyers, and dozens of other things.

Students ultimately will respond to this antivocationalism by protesting with their feet—changing majors or transferring institutions—or by later expressing dissatisfaction when they should be serving as ambassadors for a discipline and for a particular program.

Improve collaboration and communication between career services professionals and faculty. Yet all of the high-impact practices identified by Kuh, including internships, would benefit from collaborative designs developed between student affairs, faculty, and academic administrators, particularly at the dean level.

Consider an internship course where a department wanted to strike a balance between career development and learning goals. The course could be team-taught by faculty and career services professionals or could feature embedded career development modules offered through a campus career center that could then be woven back into the course and addressed in student reflections. Departments could also partner with career development professionals to develop ongoing relationships with a variety of employers, keyed to the interests of students in a particular discipline.

This practice has a long history, again, in preprofessional and professional programs, including cooperative education programs in engineering and architecture. With regard to internships, it is worth noting that CAS deliberately crafted its standards for internship programs to include both student affairs and academic departments:. Of considerable significance is the…notion that an internship program is not the sole purview of a career center or off-campus programs office….

Setting standards for internship programs will establish for administrators, faculty, and staff a set of benchmarks that identify what a quality internship program on a college campus should be [and it assumes] that there is sufficient communication between [these entities] so that the appropriate expertise can be utilized across divisions and throughout the campus.

Mid- to senior-level academic and student affairs administrators, in particular, have an important role to play here. There must be a willingness on the part of an institution to remove or reduce barriers to collaboration and communication, including the formal and informal ways in which individuals, especially faculty, are rewarded for not collaborating within and across departments and units. Are internships high-impact educational experiences? This is a question individual campuses and departments will need to answer for themselves.

In this issue, readers will learn about the high degree of the intentionality with which several colleges and universities are designing or redesigning internships. This issue is particularly timely, given the worldwide economic downturn and the need for employees to have broad and flexible skill sets in order to evolve within a highly volatile work world.

Association of American Colleges and Universities. Kuh, George D. Join our email list. Search form Search. With that said, college internships are a great place for students to meet other people. Older individuals working higher positions can serve as role models, while similarly aged peers can connect and bond over life experiences. Take the time to learn about someone as a person, as well as what his or her job entails.

In addition to working together in a professional setting, you can also take part in after-work social gatherings to build meaningful connections with people. That being said, why not dip your toes in early by taking up an internship? Participating in a college internship will allow you to develop proper business etiquette, knowledge of workplace collaboration, strong communication skills, and so much more.

These are all vital for any career you decide to pursue after graduation.