Guidelines for Internship Reflection Paper
With thanks to Guillermo Delgado [pdf]
Overview
The 'macro' question that you are answering in this paper is "SO WHAT?" So what that you did this internship? Whom does it affect? How might it be useful? How did your experience connect to your academic work? How did you grow intellectually and/or personally?
Remember that since your internship was ahighly individual experience, your paper will also be unique, addressing those specific topics and questions that concerned you. This is an important means you and your insrtructor to evaluate and learn from your experience. Therefore, please include
- a short description of what you actually did daily, and
- then demonstrate your analytical ability in your reflection on your experiences.
Your journal is a useful place to recover insights, connections, changes, small incidents that highlight larger issues, and common threads. Rely on your journal for a sense of perspective on the internship; the more complete a journal you kept, the easier this paper should be to write.
Finally, PROOFREAD AND SPELLCHECK! This is crucial, because your paper will be judged both on content and form. In some cases, mistakes even prevent the content from being understood.
Reflection Paper Sample Outline
I. Description of internship (brief) and to include:
- responsibilities
- skills learned
- project description
- problems encountered
- your expectations/goals: how and why they were or were not met
II. Analysis of internship in terms of the following:
- brief overview of the organization's mission/work and how your project contributed or related to that
- what you learned, changes you experienced
- ethical considerations/issues
III. Relationship of internship or project to academic literature
- set your experiences during the internship in the context of at least 2 readings from the course
