Using an established university level internship program, this article discusses the issues of socialization and acculturation of interns into the workplace, motivation of student employees, and the relationships between education and training/workplace and academy. Evaluations by students and their supervisors reveal the significance of these issues for positive experiential learning.

Building Connections between Industry and University: Implementing an Internship Program at a Regional University

This article presents an argument for and offers illustrations of service learning in technical communication courses and curricula. Alongside traditional internships that prepare students as future employees, service learning provides students with an education in engaged citizenship. This article reviews service-learning literature, discussing specifically the advantages of projects to students, faculty, and the community. The authors also describe three projects in which instructors and students integrated service learning and technical communication in innovative ways.

A Laboratory in Citizenship: Service Learning in the Technical Communication Classroom

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate whether unstructured graduate student research internships conducted in collaboration with community agencies build capacity and knowledge for students and community.Design/methodology/approach – The paper reports the results of four semi‐structured interviews and 20 pre‐ and post‐internship surveys of students' perceptions of their internship activities; whether participation built research capacity in students and community resulted in the creation of new knowledge and promoted ongoing partnerships and relationships.Findings – Students reported generating concrete outcomes for community partners, the acquisition of new research and professional skills, plus an increased understanding of theoretical knowledge. Many students also maintained ongoing relationships with their organizational partners beyond the terms of their internship.Research limitations/implications – Limitations to this study are the relatively small sample size and reliance on self‐repo...

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Student internships bridge research to real world problems

The purpose of this empirical study is to explore expectations of industry insiders and identify how student interns are performing in relation to those expectations as defined by 11 performance areas. The results of a survey of 238 industry supervisors were collected over a 5-year period in the departments of English and communication at a private university in the Northeast. While the results suggest that student interns tend to meet their supervisors’ expectations in many areas, performance categories such as initiative, writing skills, and oral communication skills require increased attention in the ways we prepare students for their internships and post-graduation employment and, perhaps, the ways we help onsite supervisors develop expectations for and evaluate our interns.

Trends in Industry Supervisors’ Feedback On Business Communication Internships:

As service learning becomes a popular pedagogical approach to technical and professional writing courses, instructors need to examine critically the causes of practical problems that arise when classroom work involves nonprofit agencies. Nonprofit management theory provides a possible solution in its discussion of some basic characteristics of organizations in the nonprofit sector. By understanding these characteristics, instructors and students might anticipate and solve problems they encounter.

Problems in Service Learning and Technical/Professional Writing: Incorporating the Perspective of Nonprofit Management

that, since most business and professional communication students will graduate to work in industry, the best placements for them are, therefore, necessarily in industry as well. Certainly industry-sponsored internships are valuable as career preparation. However, my five years of experience coordinating internships for our Technical & Professional Writing Program at San Francisco State University convinces me that internships in nonprofits often can provide many of the same transitional benefits as internships in industry, and more. This article makes the case for that claim plus provides practical guidance for professors who

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Louise Rehling

Papers

Doing Good While Doing Well: Service Learning Internships