The BAS/IPS Internship course offers you a “choose-your-own-adventure” type of learning approach, in which you get to choose one of three different learning Tracks. Each track has a different approach to your internship, with accompanying assignments and activities designed to get you thinking about your career and daily work life from a unique perspective.
The Three Learning Tracks for your Internship course in Canvas are:
Professional Development
Career Reflection
Documentary Storyteller
All Tracks are equal in work and time requirements. Some tracks will come to you more naturally than others based on your strengths and interest level, of course.
Choose a Track based on where you are in your career, what you hope to get out of the course, and what will help you most after you complete your internship and/or begin your next steps after you finish your degree. I've outlined some scenarios when each track would be most beneficial, but others apply as well. Please reach out to me if you'd like to discuss your choice of Track.
Below is further information about each Track. You will choose one of the Tracks to work through during this semester in Canvas. You will make this choice during the second week of the semester in a journal entry in Canvas.
Note: if you are repeating the Internship course, you must choose a different Track than you've done in any previous semesters.
The Professional Development Track
This track focuses on job-seeking and professional interactions that will be beneficial for seeking new jobs or applying for promotions. The exercises will focus on documents and skills you need to develop for these endeavors. This track is most beneficial for students heading into the job market, especially those early in their careers.
Assignments may include: drafting and rewriting a cover letter; drafting and rewriting a resume; practicing professional networking; researching interview skills; performing a mock interview.
The Career Reflection Track
This track allows you to explore the motivations and interests that drive you and help you be successful in your professional work. The exercises will focus on self-assessment and exploration of your own strengths and interests in terms of work, and investigating how different work environments and duties mesh with your strengths and interests. This track is most beneficial to students considering a career change or looking for more meaningful work, students interested in thinking about the nature of work and the meaning of their jobs, or students wanting to explore different career directions.
Assignments may include: taking strengths-finder assessments; journaling about past work experiences; crafting mock work documents and mind-maps; exploring personality type and work habits; exploratory writing about work-life balance and other career considerations.
The Documentary Storyteller Track
This track allows you to document your internship and tell the story of your work experience to a public audience. Following the form of an eye-catching blog or Instagram feed, this Track will ideally use both images and words to tell us about the ins and outs of your internship experience. You’ll create a simple website and add to it each week with one or two short entries with both words and pictures, detailing some experience from your internship (some work you did, a success story, a learning moment, an interaction you had, etc.) The prompts in Canvas will help you tell your story, giving ideas and questions you can write about in a compelling and personal way. You’ll produce a great-looking final website that shows and tells your internship journey, start to finish.
This track is most beneficial for students who’d enjoy a creative (even fun!) and innovative outlet for reflecting on their internship, students who want an ePortfolio to display their work to employers or colleagues or professors, or to students who want to share their internship experiences with others.
Assignments may include: developing weekly posts documenting moments and parts of the internship; easy, beginning web design; photographing and using images to document your work; journaling about your work; crafting your story based on storytelling patterns; choosing writing topics from a list of suggestions, or crafting your own; integrating images and text to help viewers get insight into your internship and your work.