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Internship as Senior Capstone Experience

Procedure for Internship as Senior Capstone Experience

A properly constructed internship can be a valuable capstone experience for the Earth Sciences Bachelor’s degree. The internship should be an experience uses the scientific method to hypothesize, collect and analyze a dataset, and make interpretations for a problem deduced within the sphere of the internship.  The range of possibilities and the minimum criteria for an internship to be considered for the capstone experience are given below.

 

Criteria for the validity of an internship for capstone experience credit

I. Nature and purpose of the Internship

The purpose of doing an internship as a senior capstone is to provide you with real world experience, generally in the environmental geoscience field. For the capstone to be successful, the internship should be a meaningful work experience that involves learning and intellectual engagement. It must be more than ‘shadowing’ a company employee to see what kind of work they do. During an internship you should be actively engaged in activities like learning new field or laboratory measurement techniques, performing analytical work, analyzing data, and helping to prepare reports. Towards the end of the experience you should have learned enough to be doing some independent work.

II. The internship environment

You should look for internship opportunities that will give you a range of skills useful for the workforce and insights into a potential future career. Not all internship opportunities will do this! Be aware that some internships are for volunteer/low-pay workers to a very limited range of things that will not add to your skills or your professional engagement. Internships for which you simply ‘shadow’ someone at work or are a data entry person will not count as capstone experiences. Look for internships that have opportunities for you to develop new skills to the point of working and thinking independently, or that might involve you in meaningful data analysis or research.

III. The internship outcome

As you build your proposal you will need to work out with your advisor a suitable set of products/outcomes from your experience. Your grade for the internship credit will be based on assessment of those outcomes. All students who do internships will be expected to give an oral presentation in the Department of Earth Sciences seminar series that gives an overview of what you learned during your internship and summaries of projects in which you had an important role.

 

Procedure


A. Ideally internships that count towards the senior capstone start after the end of spring term of the junior year and are completed by the end of fall term of the senior year. The internship experience should amount to 60-80 hours at a minimum.

B.  Summer internships must be approved by proposal to the department not later than April 1 of the semester preceding that summer. Fall internships follow the same procedure with a submission deadline of April 25th. 

C. Summer and Fall Internships may be paid.  Credit for internships will be accrued in the semester following the internship when the proposed outcome will be prepared and presented. 


D. Internships are not regular courses though they do get credit and a grade.  As such, you cannot preregister for them; you simply must complete the Registrar’s “Special Course Options Permission Form” by the end of Add/Drop for an Independent Study (i.e., ERSC 500). You can access the form at:  https://www.dickinson.edu/download/downloads/id/197/specialoptions_pdf.  The title of the independent study will include the word internship, so it shows up as an internship on your transcript.