Environmental Studies Internships
The beginning, middle, and end of the internship prompt three different kinds of supportive writing. Here are the requirements below:
At the beginning of the internship, when you fill out the internship paperwork with the Career Development Center:
Please write with with your internship advisor a brief description of your academic learning objectives for your internship, including a short discussion of some of the fundamental building blocks of knowledge (explanations and theories from your concentration, for example) that led you to choose the topic and site of your internship -- this is the guiding document you will use to focus and describe what you're learning in your internship work. Although you are not required to know what you will write your internship paper about at the start, this opening essay provides an opportunity to explore some questions you would like to explore, and to share these with your internship supervisor(s), to increase the chances that your internship tasks will cultivate the knowledge necessary to complete the essay you'd like to write.
Please support that brief description with a bibliography including at least two citations that refer to texts or articles that you will use in the internship or that provide information concerning your academic objectives.
During the middle phase of the internship:
You will write weekly blog-style entries, briefly reflecting on and describing what you are learning in your internship, how the internship is affecting you, and how you have been navigating the task of setting goals and carrying them out in the context of that week in the internship. Good prompting questions include: What have you been working on and what will you be working on in the last week? Do you understand clearly the nature of the work required? How are your relationships with your coworkers? Would you recommend that another student do an internship where you're doing yours? Would you consider a career in this area?
These weekly essays should be no longer than 1 page in length. They do not need to be made public, but a summary paragraph should be shared with your internship advisor and the rest of the current interns. It is not required that these essays be used to set goals and create workplans for the upcoming week, but that is a recommended starting place, because regular writing is useful for assessing how well existing activities are meeting your (and your internship site) goals, and giving you (and your advisors and colleagues) tools for revising activities and plans as appropriate.
During this middle part of the internship, you should start work on a ~5-10 page paper bringing academic analysis to a topic encountered in the internship. This paper should involve a substantial amount of library research, resulting in at least ten literature citations in the paper. Ideally, these citations should include both academic and practitioner perspectives on the topic, relating the analysis both to academic audiences related to environmental studies and also to community audiences interested in your internship site. The paper should delve more deeply into a topic related to your internship than the internship itself allows, and should be developed in consultation with your academic advisor. (The midpoint check in for the internship provides a good reminder to check in with your academic advisor for the internship about this paper if you have not already done so.)
At the end of the internship:
Please write a 1-2 page overview of the internship to post on the Environmental Studies website, providing a guide to future students, community members, or researchers about the structure of your internship and the state of the work you were engaged in at the time of the internship. How did you find and arrange the internship? What were the key tasks and important skills used during the internship? What activities, relationships, and learning had the most impact on you, and on the community you were interning with?
Please include at least two photographs showing you at your internship in this overview essay!
These are the proposed updates from the old requirements listed here: https://www.hamline.edu/cla/environmental-studies/internships.html