Developing Professionalism: Using the Organizational Socialization Construct to Orient Undergraduate Internship Students to Professional Careers

• In Event: 2222 - Teaching and Learning Symposium Roundtable Session
  In Informal Discussion Roundtable: Table 03. Preparing Students for Life After College

Abstract

Engaging students in exploring internship opportunities required that as the faculty of record, I helped students find internship placements that would work with the student’s availability to work at the internship site. In addition, to maximize the value to be gained from this learning experience, also required that I facilitate focus on life in professional organizations and help students pay attention to, and understand, the process of how novice workers become professionals. Consequently, an internship course outline was developed around the stages of organizational socialization following Feldman (1976), and later expanded based on my students’ experiences. Students were required to write weekly journals in which they reflected on the week’s topic and connected it to what they had experienced at their internship sites.
The results demonstrated that students gained great value from this focused internship experience. Weekly topical foci helped students to concentrate in one particular aspect of organization life they claimed they might otherwise not have thought about. They also reported that being required to focus on topics such as organizational language and organizational routines helped them pay closer attention to how these helped overall organizational functioning.
The results have been that students have reported the internship as a positive learning experience that helped them to better understand professional life. This presentation will share in detail the outline of this structured internship experience.

Author

• Johanna Bishop