Internship Programs - Where do I start?

[Daniel Bird]

Hey Everyone,

I'm in the process of writing an internship program in a very specialised area; Television. My director thinks that four different interns doing four different specialisations is the way to go. It's a great opportunity for me to develop a good training package and so far so good.

I was wondering if anyone knows of any good resources (preferably web based and free) that would give me a head start on how to write curriculum's for these.

Learning outcomes, time required etc.. etc..

It all just seems a bit overwhelming at the moment.

Any suggestions would be great!

[djt]

Can't help with curriculum, however last year I implemented an Internship program in my organisation, so thought I might share some of the things that worked well:

- the students had real life problems that we needed to have work done on - they loved that they were doing something useful, not just building widgets. The problems were project based so that they could see them through to the end - they gave us very strong feedback about how much they enjoyed that

- the students presented to staff at the end of the assignment - with much open discussion and debate

- aside from a supervisor being appointed, we also appointed a buddy from the team for more informal support

- the students were encouraged to also work closely together although they had different projects and were in different teams

- the buddy and supervisor were asked to keep in touch with the intern after the program, and the intern was advised to stay in touch and network with the team also

- we discussed the program with key academics who were very keen to work with us on it and in fact 'advertised' it for us in their lectures (thus the total cost was essentially wages)