{"title":"Zoom or Gloom: The Challenges of a Virtual Internship Experience","authors":"Clinton M. Jenkins, S. McQueen, Susan L. Wiley","doi":"10.1080/15512169.2022.2148532","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The rise of the Covid-19 pandemic changed many facets of life for college students. College students were sent home in the middle of a semester, forced to quickly figure out how to learn virtually and take classes online that had been in-person. This change also resulted in a proliferation of virtual internships. The existing scholarship on virtual internships is sparse, leaving many questions, specifically, what makes a virtual internship “successful?” We examine this question by analyzing feedback of interns collected via a novel survey of students completing a virtual internship during Spring 2020, Fall 2020, and Spring 2021. We explore the effect of remote interning on a student’s overall satisfaction with the internship experience, duties performed, technical difficulties faced while interning virtually, as well as specific factors that may improve the virtual internship experience for students. Results suggest that virtual internships can be highly successful component of student learning. We close by providing recommendations for internship coordinators interested in supporting virtual internship experiences.","PeriodicalId":46033,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Political Science Education","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9000,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Political Science Education","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15512169.2022.2148532","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"POLITICAL SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract The rise of the Covid-19 pandemic changed many facets of life for college students. College students were sent home in the middle of a semester, forced to quickly figure out how to learn virtually and take classes online that had been in-person. This change also resulted in a proliferation of virtual internships. The existing scholarship on virtual internships is sparse, leaving many questions, specifically, what makes a virtual internship “successful?” We examine this question by analyzing feedback of interns collected via a novel survey of students completing a virtual internship during Spring 2020, Fall 2020, and Spring 2021. We explore the effect of remote interning on a student’s overall satisfaction with the internship experience, duties performed, technical difficulties faced while interning virtually, as well as specific factors that may improve the virtual internship experience for students. Results suggest that virtual internships can be highly successful component of student learning. We close by providing recommendations for internship coordinators interested in supporting virtual internship experiences.
期刊介绍:
The Journal of Political Science Education is an intellectually rigorous, path-breaking, agenda-setting journal that publishes the highest quality scholarship on teaching and pedagogical issues in political science. The journal aims to represent the full range of questions, issues and approaches regarding political science education, including teaching-related issues, methods and techniques, learning/teaching activities and devices, educational assessment in political science, graduate education, and curriculum development. In particular, the journal''s Editors welcome studies that reflect the scholarship of teaching and learning, or works that would be informative and/or of practical use to the readers of the Journal of Political Science Education , and address topics in an empirical way, making use of the techniques that political scientists use in their own substantive research.