The Internship Experience

What would a model meaningful internship look like?

There should be benchmarks and standards for the internship. School district supervisors should be provided with a standardized list of expectations and a curriculum that the intern must complete. For example, it is much better for interns to work in solid blocks instead of an hour here and an hour there. Such information should be provided by SDBL programs to the sponsoring school district supervisor.

There should be specific tasks that interns are expected to complete (e.g. the "Blue Sheets" provided by SUNY Brockport). These tasks should be reviewed on a regular basis to ensure that they are still meaningful. In order to ensure that these tasks are meaningful, it is the responsibility of the SDBL program to maintain continuous communication with interns and school district supervisors.

In addition to the internship program, students should also have access to a mentor for more informal discussions outside of the supervisor/intern relationship. This will help the student begin to network, discover new perspectives, and develop confidence with communication within the profession. It is important that this happen with someone not involved in evaluating or grading the intern.

The SDBL program has to be committed to working with school districts to identify internship opportunities. NYSASBO should consider finding ways to assist SDBL programs with achieving this and "hooking into the network" of school districts.

To ensure the continuous flow of new people into the professions, internship programs need to be flexible to account for the different circumstances people face at different points in their life. This flexibility cannot come at the cost of the meaningfullness of the experience.

Internships should last for a full cycle of business functions. A short internship will miss some very important aspects of the profession. A full time internship in the fall only, for example, would miss the budget development and presentation aspects. Currently it is not a requirement to experience all of the functions of the job in order to fulfill the graduation requirements.