A Biomedical Engineering Graduate Industrial Internship Program: Structure, Implementation, and Evaluation

Abstract

Dallas Abstract A graduate industrial internship program is described that has been implemented in the joint graduate biomedical engineering program of the University of Texas at Arlington and the University of Texas Medical Center at Dallas for over a decade. Graduate students who complete 9 or more credit hours of graduate course work with a GPA ≥ 3.0 may elect to participate in the internship program. The interns work at industrial sites, either part- or full time. A faculty member serves as the advisor for the student and interfaces with the supervisor of the student at the firm. The advisor verifies that the assigned project provides the student with meaningful industrial experience and also monitors the student’s progress. Participating students register for internship credit hours and receive a letter grade based on their performance. Participation in the internship program is optional and the accrued internship course credit hours are not applied toward the graduate degree course requirement. That is, they may not be substituted for required didactic or research credit hours. . However, the research findings associated with the industrial project may qualify as a non-thesis master’s project, a master’s thesis, or even a Ph.D. dissertation, depending on the scientific merit of the findings. Thus far, 25 students have successfully completed the internship program. All participants have successfully completed the internship program. Upon graduation, over 10% of the interns have been hired as full time employees by the company where they interned. The rest of the interns after graduation have become employed as engineers at other industrial firms or research