Internship Guidelines and Requirements
What constitutes an internship that can be taken for course credit within the English major at SLU?
The English Department seeks to place its students in internship environments where they go beyond doing purely clerical work and can make meaningful connections between their course of study and the practical, social, and intellectual demands of a workplace. For this reason, the English Department requires a significant academic component to the internship, one through which students extend their on-site work through a process of critical reflection and analysis.
The SLU English internship comprises these basic elements: on-site work, academic component, and evaluation. To foster a stimulating learning experience in the workplace, the English department has established the following requirements and guidelines for these elements.
On-site work: Secured by the student, the internship is typically voluntary; must be 10 hours/week for 15 weeks; provides occasions for students to both apply existing skills as well as develop new ones; represents a significant opportunity for career exploration and/or mentoring. Students must find and make arrangements for the internship themselves (including making sure they have transportation to and from the work site), and they are responsible for securing department approval for the internship to earn 3 hours of course credit. Approval for the internship requires the submission of a Student Learning Agreement and arranging a pre-internship meeting with the Internship Coordinator.
Academic component: This represents the critical thinking by which students extend their on-site experience and bridge their work experience with their academic one.
Evaluation: Two means of evaluation are used to add value to the student’s experience of participating in the internship program.
The English Department seeks to place its students in internship environments where they go beyond doing purely clerical work and can make meaningful connections between their course of study and the practical, social, and intellectual demands of a workplace. For this reason, the English Department requires a significant academic component to the internship, one through which students extend their on-site work through a process of critical reflection and analysis.
The SLU English internship comprises these basic elements: on-site work, academic component, and evaluation. To foster a stimulating learning experience in the workplace, the English department has established the following requirements and guidelines for these elements.
On-site work: Secured by the student, the internship is typically voluntary; must be 10 hours/week for 15 weeks; provides occasions for students to both apply existing skills as well as develop new ones; represents a significant opportunity for career exploration and/or mentoring. Students must find and make arrangements for the internship themselves (including making sure they have transportation to and from the work site), and they are responsible for securing department approval for the internship to earn 3 hours of course credit. Approval for the internship requires the submission of a Student Learning Agreement and arranging a pre-internship meeting with the Internship Coordinator.
Academic component: This represents the critical thinking by which students extend their on-site experience and bridge their work experience with their academic one.
- Record of activity: This is a record of the daily activity that the student completes during the internship. As this record is meant to help produce the final paper (project), it should be more robust than a description of tasks. For more details, click here. For their own sake (i.e., to build a portfolio of samples for future job applications), students are encouraged to be comprehensive in keeping this record and ask for copies of any materials they’ve produced or helped produce while interning.
- Final paper (project): This 5-page final paper (or equivalently sized project) is essentially a demonstration of how students' internship experiences connect to their coursework in the English major. It should be submitted to the Internship Coordinator on the first day of finals week of the internship semester. For more details, click here.
Evaluation: Two means of evaluation are used to add value to the student’s experience of participating in the internship program.
- Intern Survey: Students are asked to evaluate their internship experience by completing an internship survey after they submit their final paper (project). For details about the survey, click here.
- Intern Performance Evaluation: Sponsors will be asked to complete a performance evaluation of the intern’s work. This evaluation will be used, along with the final paper (project), to determine the internship’s grade for the internship, which will be either Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory. The performance evaluation form can be very valuable to the student in that it can serve as the basis for future letters of reference. For more details, click here.