Grad Internship and Prof Dev

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

The Graduate Internship and Professional Development course offers graduate students from across the university access to real-world skills building while interning at an established company, non-profit, or government agency where they can apply those skills. The course encourages whole person learning through our holistic pedagogy combining experiential, formal, and program specific learning. Students set professional SMART goals at the start of their internship. They complete weekly asynchronous training modules and skills workshops to build core professional skills such as cross-cultural communication, working remotely, networking, emotional intelligence, sales, presentations, navigating bureaucracy, and more. Students produce bi-weekly written reflections on how they have and/or will apply what they learn in the course to their graduate program specific professional development, internship, and future career pathways. This facilitates cross-discipline learning with their classmates from diverse graduate programs. Each graduate program assigns a liaison who will deepen the grad program specific professional development experiences for students, including student attendance at in-person professional development mentoring, training, and networking events specifically as they relate to their graduate program’s career pathways. Students join LinkedIn groups with alumni from their program and direct message them to conduct informational interviews. At the end of the course, students design an Individual Career Development Plan to direct their career trajectory after completing the graduate program.