Evaluating personal income from internships

Abstract

Graduate students contemplating an instructional design internship should consider not only what they have to offer an organization but what they want to take away from the experience. Current literature on this topic focuses on the mutual benefits of internships for both the business and academic communities. This paper concentrates solely on the benefits to the individual interns which may be described as three kinds of personal income: financial, experiential, and psychological incomes. A group of former and current interns were interviewed and were asked to give their opinion on the three incomes. Then they were asked to evaluate the importance of each income, both before and after their internship. Interviews revealed some trends in how participants described the three incomes and indicated that an internship itself may precipitate a shift in how one rates the importance of each. In order to help prospective interns assess what they want from a position, a checklist of questions to consider is included.

"In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it. The must not do too much of it. And they must have a sense of success in it."

John Ruskin (1819–1900)