The style and content of the journal will be negotiated with your Faculty Supervisor. In general you should make entries that help you evaluate your internship in light of relevant sociological material (books/articles). Make reference to them in your journal entries. You are expected to be reading continuously and making appropriate professional citations in your journal. A bibliography is usually required.
The internship is intended to provide the student with an opportunity to enhance his or her education through activities performed outside the classroom (paid or voluntary) within a work setting in the “real world.” The setting will ordinarily be a social agency or some sort of business establishment, although other varieties of organizational placement are also possible. Details pertinent to selecting a site and arranging for an internship are discussed elsewhere. This section speaks only to one central component of the typical internship experience: the student journal.
As a starting point, an important fact should be kept in mind: internship credits are not awarded simply for participating in the work setting faithfully on a day-to-day basis but for demonstrating creative, analytic, sociological thought and intellectual growth as a consequence of that day-to-day work activity. Without this criterion, the academic department would be placed in the awkward position of granting academic credit for a potentially non-academic experience. Therefore, the faculty supervisor must have some means, written and/or oral, of judging the student’s academic achievement. Those means might include (depending upon specific arrangements made between each student and her/his faculty supervisor), a research paper, reviews of relevant books or journal articles, periodic face-to-face meetings, or perhaps most commonly, an internship journal.
What should that journal “be”? How should it be organized and conveyed? What is appropriate content for it? The first trick to becoming a successful academic journal writer is to always think of yourself as a storyteller. Your particular story is a “telling” about the sociological background, social influences, social structure, and social processes which characterize the setting in which you are working. Do not take anything for granted, and do not assume that the reader can grasp the subtleties and relevance and context of the situation without your describing them. Your job is to convey the substance and significance of your topic with the same ample detail that you would appreciate if you were having the same story told to you. “Cinderella,” although basically a tale about domestic abuse, about the startling transmutation of mice and pumpkins into horses and carriages, and about romantic dreams come true, is far more captivating in its familiar “Once upon a time” form of delivery than as a case entry reading “Destitute, delusional young female exhibited hallucinatory behavior today.” You need not write a fairy tale, a novel, or even a short story depicting every incident at your work site, but take the time and effort to flesh out a few particularly interesting situations in some length and detail. Try it; you’ll probably find that you enjoy it – - and learn some things you hadn’t thought about before!
It might be easier to visualize what the journal should be by first visualizing what it should not be. The journal should not be limited to descriptive summaries of what occurred on a given day, no matter how lengthy or detailed. This is where a great deal of confusion arises in terms of the discrepancy between what may come most readily or automatically for the student, on the one hand, and what the faculty supervisor wishes and expects, on the other. It is perfectly fine (in fact, it is proper) to begin each journal entry as a dated, diary-format summarization of what the student has experienced at the internship site. But the premium from the instructor’s point of view is upon what the student is learning and applying from those same experiences.
Some students prefer daily entries, but weekly or twice weekly entries may be acceptable depending upon site circumstances. It is important not to let too much time elapse between entries, because important details can be quickly forgotten. Also, it is often during a rigidly scheduled daily (or nightly) write-up that the best insights, applications, and connections come to mind. Brief, general activity descriptions are normally ample; exhaustive detail should be avoided unless it serves a real purpose in making a particular point or in depicting the special, fine-tuned nuances of an unusual problem or situation. But more important than the descriptive details are the sense the student makes of it; this “making sense of it” sort of discussion is the most vital part of the journal and probably the single greatest key to making the internship a valuable educational experience rather than just a work activity alone. Why did things happen the way they did? How does an incident relate to other aspects of the organization, or to particular personnel or personnel functions? Is there a consistency or inconsistency between related incidents or situations? How might things have been handled differently, if at all? Does the reality experience agree with, or contradict, what courses and textbooks have had to say about it? What have you learned today that helps make better sense of a confusing or frustrating occurrence of two weeks ago? How so? Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. A properly compiled journal, in short, confirms that the student is truly learning and that her/his “mind is alive,” as opposed to simply moving through mechanical routines unthinkingly.
So let’s review, from a slightly different perspective. What you should seek to create is an analytical journal, as distinct from a purely descriptive journal. A descriptive journal, which many students tend to write and submit, simply records the main events which occur day to day on the job. In extreme form, the reader/evaluator might find just a one sentence or one paragraph mention of a single noteworthy task, event, or activity from a given day on site. (Even at the purely descriptive level, there should be a more lengthy and more detailed account of a broader span of the day’s experience.) More important, however, the point is that the academic evaluator needs to be able to see (i.e., to read) what learning experience(s) took place. Otherwise, the evaluator finds himself/herself in the awkward and impossible position of attempting to evaluate academic performance solely on the basis of purely physical behaviors. A descriptive Journal tells nothing about what is being learned, so as to justify the granting of the academic credit which the student seeks.
An analytical journal, on the other hand, begins with the same reporting of events but then intersperses sections of commentary and discussion which show the reader that a sociological perspective is being applied. Let’s say that the setting is a social agency of some sort and the student is reporting an interesting case contact that occurred on a given day. The rudimentary, purely descriptive journal entry might simply state “Dealt with an interesting case.” Period! The more expansive entry (of the type desired by the evaluator) first gives added detail about the nature of the case and what makes it particularly interesting. (Important side note: Always use pseudonyms, not actual names, when referring to any client or customer.) Was it the issue itself that made the case interesting and worthy of added thought and discussion? If so, how? Why? Was it the people involved? If so, why? How? What aspects or characteristics were most pertinent? Was it a combination of issue and participants that creates the interest? If so, describe the interaction of the two.
Next, now that you have fleshed out the descriptive basics, go on to analysis, implications, and/or applications. Why do you think things happened the way they did? What is it about the organization, or about the organization’s policies or rules or regulations or assumptions or standardized approaches, or about the people involved, that provides an accounting for the incident? What concepts, perspectives, or theories from your academic course work have a possible bearing? Identify them, and talk about how they fit – or, if appropriate, about how they fail to explain what they’re supposed to be able to explain. In other words, does the classroom and textbook theory match what you see as being the reality? If not, how does the academic material need to be adjusted or updated in terms of the insufficiencies you have discovered? For example, did the researchers who formulated a particular theory or concluded their article with a set of statistically significant findings fail to note a variable that you consider all-important in your setting? What would you call that variable? How would you describe it? How would you define it operationally and measure it?
As for implications and applications, show some thinking (in print) about such topics as the effect of changes or difficulties in one aspect of the organization upon other aspects of the organization, with an effort to demonstrate your understanding and appreciation of the total operation as a social system, rather than as a collection of independent features. (Examples: Does low salary cause low morale, which in turn causes low commitment and shoddy work? Are parallel situations handled so differently by various staff members that organizational inconsistency and confusion results? Is training adequate for performance needs? Is there a two-way flow of communication up and down the organizational hierarchy?) Similarly, experiment with suggestions which you identify for organizational modifications (in either structure or process or both) or for new directions the organization might take – or might find itself forced to take against its real wishes – or current activities/topics/functions that the organization might consider eliminating because of new priorities, expectations, or focuses. These might very well be suggestions or insights that you would not necessarily share with organization supervisors, but they can be very helpful in giving the academic evaluator a sense of your trajectory of, learning and intellectual growth.
The above is intended as a broad outline of several of the ways available to you to add depth and substance to your journal content. You won’t be expected to cover everything described here, nor should you attempt to go into equivalent depth with every single journal entry. Also, keep in mind that you shouldn’t limit yourself to the types of questions and examples illustrated here. Each internship setting has unique features which allow unique observations and interpretations. What you read here is meant as a guide, not a mandatory standard- The social universe is highly varied and ever-changing, and part of your job is to discover how to best adapt the academic learning element of the internship to the features of your particular setting. With these guiding principles and suggestions in mind, Proceed and enjoy! It is practically guaranteed that the end result will be to make your internship experience a more meaningful and valued one for you.
Oregon State University. (2007) The Internship Practicum journal. On “Students.” Department of Sociology. Corvallis, OR. Last Accessed on 16 August 2008. Web address: http://oregonstate.edu/cla/sociology/students/inter
