Psychology Internships are internships that are related to Psychological Science as a field of study. Internships have been defined as job training for different organizations. Internships are meant to help students or workers increase their expertise in their field of study and get a grasp of what the work field has to offer. Almost every college and university offers internships to their students in order to help them get a head start on their careers.
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Because psychology is a complex undergraduate degree program, students often don’t get what they intended from the internships they take part in. Universities bear some responsibility here, as they are supposed to be the main source of internship enrollment. Students often complain that they have a hard time finding jobs after their internships, even when the internships relate to the jobs they are interested in. Lacking the appropriate experience, a student may step into a job and struggle to connect the new responsibilities with past internship experiences.
Studies
When picking a major and career choice, students are typically interested in gaining as much experience in that field as possible so they can be successful. Over 500 students at the average university are majoring in psychology. Most of these students will or have had the opportunity to experience an internship that would advance their knowledge and give them a brief sample of what is to come once they get into the workforce. Researchers believe that creating an online community compiled with internship agencies and resources will increase student participation and satisfaction with internships. Conducting surveys and interviews with the psychology students and staff can provide details on the current internships and also provide feedback. Concerns can be documented, such as internships not being paid, not having connections with permanent job positions, and not increasing expertise of the interns. The benefits of internships, defined as structured and career-relevant work experiences obtained by students prior to graduation from an academic program, have been widely extolled by academicians, practitioners, and students themselves.
Internships are hypothesized to assist students in the crystallization of their vocational self-concept by facilitating the identification of vocationally relevant abilities, interests, and values.
Expertise
Many students come into internships for the goal to increase their expertise. Interning is somewhat like job shadowing, where the individual is not a full-time worker but is getting the experience and awareness of the job. The movement to define and promote revised quality standards for internship programs has taken shape in the past several years in meetings of the BEA, the CCTC, the CoA, and the APA Council of Representatives (CoR). Although several studies have reported that internships yield high job satisfaction and favorable employment opportunities for participants, this research has rarely controlled for potential contaminants such as career goals and grade point average. For at least 14 years there has been a sizable and increasing imbalance between the number of applicants and the number of available internship positions. The number of students entering the APPIC match has risen steadily during that time at a rate consistently outpacing the growth of internship slots. Psychology trainees complete their training with a 1-year full-time internship, which requires two hours of individual supervision and two hours of group supervision per week, and however, research does not specify the variables that are important for effective supervision in specific internship settings; rather, it is left to the site supervisors to decide with their supervisors what is best. There are a wide variety of internship sites for interns, which include university counseling centers, community mental health centers, veterans’ affairs medical centers, correctional facilities, public and private hospitals, medical schools, consortia, and child and adolescent psychiatric facilities.
Future solutions
Creating a community available to all psychological science students at Universities containing internship information and resources, will increase awareness of internship opportunities. Creating a community available to all psychological science students at universities containing internship information and resources, will increase the number of internship opportunities available for students. By allowing students to look through potential internship sites through the Blackboard community or look for their own, the satisfaction of the internship program experience will should have an increase. Creating a survey form on Qualtrics for students to fill in potential internship site information to get approved by internship advisers if they would like to find their own. Possible steps included in a successful internship program: Prerequisite classes for students wishing to complete an internship, interviewing students who wish to complete an internship, and placing them. This extensive process creates competition and eliminates students who are not committed to the internship program. If the internship program becomes too much for one faculty member to handle, it could be helpful to have one faculty member in charge of outside agency communication and interviewing students, and another faculty member to track the progress of the students.