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Internship Policy
  • Internships can provide a unique and valuable opportunity to apply the knowledge and skills you’ve acquired in your psychology classes. Working with a psychology faculty member and a site supervisor, you can craft a learning contract that will meaningfully relate your work in the community to other material you’ve encountered in your study of psychology. Depending on how many hours you work at your site, you can earn between 1 and 4 credits for your internship. 
  • In general, 4-credit internships conducted under the supervision of a psychology faculty member will count as your “wild card” (elective) course within the major. You, your site supervisor, and your faculty sponsor will determine the goals, strategies, and assignments that best meet your learning objectives and that ensure the experience advances your knowledge of psychology.
  • An internship can substitute for one of your three upper level requirements only if your learning contract articulates a set of goals and assignments equivalent to the workload and intellectual intensity of a typical upper-level course. The following list spells out the features of an upper-level internship:
    • Just as upper-level courses involve considerable engagement with the scholarly literature, internships also involve considerable engagement with relevant scholarship. Although students and their faculty supervisors will determine the specific readings best suited to the internship, we expect that the student will read a minimum of 20 scholarly sources (peer-reviewed journal articles; books or book chapters written for a professional audience) related to the internship.
    • The student will submit reflection papers, typically weekly, that explicitly connect these scholarly sources to the internship experience.
    • The student will conclude their internship by writing a paper (12+ pages, not including title page and references) that focuses on a key issue within the field of psychology and that draws upon both the student’s internship experience and her/his critical reading of the scholarly literature.
    • Only junior and senior majors are eligible to complete an internship for upper-level credit.