Internships are a great opportunity to find out more about your chosen field while building your work experience and a portfolio. CDS majors can take COMM 499: Internship for credit and to satisfy the Experiential Learning (EL) graduation requirement. If they take it for 3 credits, then the internship can count as an upper-level elective in the major. If you are interested in pursuing an internship, please do the following:
1) Find an internship – make sure that it is appropriate for the major, and that the work you will do meets the university requirements for internships. You can find the university guidelines and policies on the Career Center’s internship webpage. Once you have a worksite for your internship, talk to a faculty member in the major about serving as the faculty advisor.
2) Complete the Academic Internship Contract – if you are taking the internship for credit then you need to make sure that you are able to work the minimum number of hours and meet the other criteria. Then complete the Academic Internship Contract on the Career Center’s webpage. Share this with the faculty advisor for your internship.
3) ELC Department Proposal – once the Academic Internship Contract is ready, then you need to complete an internship proposal for the ELC Department. You can find the guidelines, as well as a sample proposal, on the ELC Department’s Guidelines for Internships page. The deadline for this proposal is during the first week of the semester that you are doing the internship, so best to plan ahead and have it ready before the start of the semester.