In seeking to collect information that would be beneficial for program designers at other colleges and universities about the kinds of internship experiences that best serve English Department students, I developed two questions:
• How do students connect with internship providers?
• What internship experiences and partnerships have you found the most beneficial for
English studies students and why?
These two questions allowed for discussions about how program designers might go about developing relationships with community partners and the kinds of student projects that benefited students. A recent study examining internship satisfaction tackled a facet of this: “characteristics of the more general work environment not just the work itself need to be
considered as predictors of internship satisfaction. These issues differ from job characteristics in that they came from more affect-based characteristics of the environment.” Research reveals that internships providing “significant learning opportunities” with support from the supervisors resulted in the highest satisfaction (D’Abate, Youndt, Wenzel 530). Identifying the environments that include these characteristics and connecting students to them seem the most obvious and essential ways for program directors to provide paths to student success.
As previously mentioned, both Dr. Crusoe and Dr. Villette provided that students often find the settings where they can intern on their own; however, faculty members can also help students with the selection of internships. Dr. Crusoe explained that if students come to her seeking help finding internships, she explores with them the kind of internships they might like
to engage with. Questions such as “What are your long term plans once you graduate? What kind of work do you want to be involved with?” help her direct students to potential internship
providers. She also commented, “Most of our students who think they kind of want to do an internship really need more experience at editing and at writing within a supervised situation within a workplace than they imagine they do.” She often connects these students first with several different internship providers within the English Department for them to talk with in order to explore the possibilities of on-campus experiences.
By encouraging the students to talk with the editors and managers of these organizations, students almost always find opportunities of interest that work well for the course requirements and give them chances to write and edit. Because instructors and professors often lead the on- campus internships, GSU mentors in these organizations are aware of the writing skills and supervisory needs of GSU students during internships. Dr. Crusoe also advised, however, that sometimes on-campus internships can be challenging for professors and university staff members due to their teaching and administrative responsibilities. Given that faculty members know these individuals, it much easier to work with these mentors to rework internships in line with the needs of the mentors and students. A lack of supervision can lead to dissatisfaction on the part of the students and require a program director to step in and provide additional support. This, according to both Dr. Crusoe and Dr. Vilette, is an unusual occurrence. Later in this project, I will explore how GSU faculty members have intervened during difficult situations.
The development of relationships with on-campus partnerships is in line with one of the opportunities The Chronicle of Higher Education and the American Public Media’s Marketplace
revealed in its report: “Colleges and universities should view the working lives of their students not as a challenge, but as an opportunity, given the weight employers of all kinds place on
experiential elements of a recent graduate’s resume” (15). On-campus partnerships at GSU also seem to serve the schedules of GSU students well. As GSU has a significant number of students who live off campus and commute to campus, many of the students have jobs and families in addition to coursework and campus commitments. Ross Perlin addresses this in his book when he discusses unpaid internships as “most young Americans, in most circumstances, cannot afford to work for free or less than minimum wage for any appreciable period of time. . . . it’s
impossible to estimate how often a young person’s career ambitions are blocked by the financial hardship of an internship” (160). While there may be some validity to Perlin’s arguments that unpaid internships are only available to those who can afford them, GSU’s internship course model provides access to workplaces on campus so that commuting students can participate around their class schedules. Marilyn Gilroy see internships as experiences that “immerses students in a culture completely different from the one they might have grown up in” (34). While economically internships may be difficult endeavors for some students to participate in, GSU embraces the value of these experiences and works to help students secure positions that work with their schedules and provide access to experience-based learning opportunities.
While the GSU on-campus partnerships, as evidenced by the statistics in Chapter Four, have led to a significant number of internships for undergraduate students, there have also been many successful established relationships that are not in the downtown Atlanta community. Established relationships with Creative Loafing and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have allowed many GSU students to pursue internships in writing and editing. Dr. Crusoe explained that these organizations have worked well for the students because both organizations have internal structures that adhere to Department of Labor requirements and focus on student
projects that have described post-surgical infection concerns or poison control information. At
Creative Loafing, she provided that an editor and internship supervisor typically oversee the interns, which has provided for substantial oversight and guidance. These particular internship providers revealed to students not only the high standards expected for workplace writing but also where their own grammar and writing skills needed to develop (Crusoe).
Dr. Villette also works to help students find education-related internships through a series of questions that allow the identification of providers, but setting up internships is a little
different. Dr. Villette explained that when she first started, she would help students find the school where they would intern. Literally, she would search the internet with them looking for a possible schools, approaching the quest as if it were a job search. Then, the GSU College of Education reached to the English Department to communicate that they wanted to facilitate the teaching internship appointments in the public schools. This has actually been quite helpful, as the College of Education has established relationships with counties due to student teaching appointments. Now, students identify where they would like to intern—often the with names of teachers they would like to work with—and Dr. Villette passes this information onto the College of Education field office. A staff person then handles the approval process with the counties and schools. Students often go back to schools they attended; however, they also seek teaching internships in new environments. If students are unsure where they might like to intern, she, like Dr. Crusoe, helps them to identify possible internships through a series of questions that explores the following criteria: “where they live; how it is easy to commute; what demographic they are interested in teaching or getting exposed to; what their interests are in teaching; and what kinds of students they are interested in working with. [She then encourages them to] look on the web, visit school websites, see how [the school] looks . . . and feels” (Villette).
While the College of Education oversees the approval for internships in the public school system, they are not involved with private school internships or internships in other education- based spaces. While my review of the archives revealed that students held internship
appointments in eleven counties in metro Atlanta, according to Dr. Villette, there are school systems and mentors that are particularly welcoming to GSU students. This has resulted in the establishment of relationships that create particularly positive and productive student internship experiences. Sometimes students work with multiple internship mentors at a given school to gain exposure to a wide variety of teaching styles and students, while others work with one teacher in one class. Our discussion also confirmed that internships in non-school based environments, such as writing centers, literacy programs, and other non-profit spaces are areas that offer unique and interesting opportunities for students. While a limited number of students have pursued these, Dr. Villette expressed a desire to grow this area of the program, but she recognized it will require her to develop relationships with new internship providers and connect students to these
opportunities. She is cognizant of the time commitment needed for expansion of the program and will be deliberate in her pursuit of these initiatives.
Dr. Villette’s understanding of the amount of time it can take to establish community partnerships is an important consideration for program design. Bourelle, like Dr. Villette, sees this is an important consideration given “the lack of extra compensation and the sheer amount of time and effort these mentor roles take” (“New Perspectives 188). This situation is echoed in the work of Robert J. Lahm and Kirk C. Heriot in their article entitled “Creating an Entrepreneurship Internship Program: A Case Study”: “Finding firms that were willing to participate or that had existing internship hiring processes was one part of the process [to create an internship program]. . . . From the point of view of the coordinator, this was very time consuming but not necessarily
well recognized as such by colleagues” (88). Lahm and Heriot’s work emphasizes the
importance of allowing sufficient time for the planning, administration, and implementation of new program initiatives (95).
Another location that has offered particularly strong internship experiences has been at GSU with English Department faculty members and instructors to learn about teaching at the college level. Dr. Villette and Dr. Crusoe have placed students in internships where students were exposed to literary studies and rhetoric and composition pedagogical practices. Students observed classes, developed lesson plans, and even lead discussions. Other interns have helped professors with research to gain an understanding of the demands of scholarly publishing and writing. Later in this chapter, I explore the kinds activities and practices that make these internships particularly viable experiences for student interns given that they are on the GSU campus and the internship mentors are professors who understand the goals of the internship program and course design.