Senior Sequence

Internships, Research Teams & Mentors

Senior Sequence Research and Internship Requirements

During the course of the Senior Sequence each student must complete an internship in a placement of their own choosing. If you are reading this and you’d like to offer an internship placement for one of our students, please refer to our partners page: http://www.seniorsequence.net/index.php/partners/

Students are encouraged to do their Senior Research Project (SRP) on a topic related to their internship. In a few cases, the internship placement serves as the base of operations for a Student-Mentor Research Team focused on one of our Grand Challenges (see description below).  Some organizations are able to pay their student intern an hourly wage or stipend.  Other organizations lack the financial resources to pay students (so the students serve as volunteers).  In either case, each student is obligated to do at least 100 hours of service to meet the USP internship requirement. 

The USP Program maintains a list of internship placements organized into Areas of Concentration. Over the past two decades,  the USP program has placed students in a wide range of internships in city and county offices, including departments of health, and planning. Other placements include service with state and county government, elected public officials, city council members, environmental consulting firms, real estate agencies, non-profit and grassroots organizations.  Students generally begin their internship at the mid-point of USP 186 (i.e., late October) and continue in the same internship until the mid-point of USP 187 (i.e., mid-February), but there is some flexibility in this regard.

The intent of the internship requirement is to give students work experience in a professional setting of their choice.   In some cases the internship supervisor provides the organizational leadership for a student-mentor research team. In such cases, students have the option of leveraging their internship experience to meet their SRP requirement (e.g., by doing a case study or policy analysis related to their internship placement).

Students are required to get a signed internship contract from their placement supervisor as soon as they start the position. The student is expected to upload a pdf version of that form into their online Senior Sequence portfolio. At the end of the 100 hours, each student is expected to get a signed evaluation from their supervisor. That form also gets uploaded by the student into their online Senior Sequence portfolio.

Areas of Concentration and Grand Challenges

Areas of Concentration (AOC): There are ten AOCs (see: aocs-and-types-of-internships.pdf). The AOCs are created and defined by the professor of the Senior Sequence. Each AOC has one or more Grand Challenges. The GCs are defined by the instructor of the Senior Sequence in collaboration with mentors and students.  The GCs are cutting-edge topics where there is a strong need to link knowledge to action (e.g., sustainable design of buildings and urban-ecological landscapes). Students have the option to form teams, with the help of the course professor—and a mentor.  Mentors include faculty,  professionals from public and private sector organizations, non-profit executives, community-based and industry leaders, among others.  The GC database includes the following information for each GC:  title, AOC, narrative overview, solutions, research team topic suggestions, key terms, and references to literature, internet links and key organizations.  A link to the GC database is on the top nav bar of this web site.

Student-Mentor Research Teams

Each Student-Mentor Research Team (RT) includes between two to five students. Each RT must have a mentor. There can be more than one mentor per RT. The subject matter of these teams varies from year to year depending on the interests of each year’s new crop of Senior Sequence students, and available mentors.  The title and substantive content of the RTs are established through student-mentor interaction. The professor of the Senior Sequence facilitates the RT formation process by enabling the students to coordinate amongst themselves, and with a mentor. Each research team has a group profile on-line that contains the following information:  the RT’s title, affiliation with one or more AOC and GC, narrative overview (the team story), multimedia postercasts of student projects, key terms, references, and links. 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) 

1. What is the difference between an Internship Supervisor and a Research Team Mentor? An internship supervisor takes one or more USP students under his or her wing at said supervisor’s place of work. An internship supervisor guides their intern—meeting with them on a weekly basis—as the student logs in 100 hours.  The supervisor spells out the intern’s duties in advance on a placement listing filed with the USP office.

A Research Team Mentor does not necessarily have the same level of commitment as an internship supervisor.  Full detail of what is and is not expected of a mentor is spelled out on our Mentor_Guide.pdf. Suffice it to say here that a mentor does not necessarily provide the student with an internship placement. Rather they just provide expert guidance.  During the fall, each student writes a research proposal (modeled on what they would do if looking for grant money).  In the winter, they do the research and write their senior research project (modeled on a journal article).  Research Team Mentors help students at several points in this process:

• When the students are formulating questions, mentors provide direction,
 
• At the stage of writing the proposal,  mentors comment on the viability of the project and
 
• At the time of writing up the paper, mentors comment on the draft.  In some cases an internship supervisor may also were a mentor hat (serve both roles simultaneously).  The next couple FAQs elaborates on this point.

2. Can a student’s participation (time invested) as a member of a student-mentor research team be counted toward said student’s 100 hours of required internship time? Yes, but only if certain conditions are met. The main condition is that the mentor files an internship contract with the USP office. For the hours to count as internship time, the mentor must agree to serve as an internship supervisor.  In some cases, we have been able to craft mentorship/internships that coincide (overlap): the data the organization wants would also happen to be a good basis for a senior research project.  But that doesn’t always happen.  Many students are interns at organizations that don’t have anyone acting as a mentor.

3. Can students get paid for doing their research and/or service learning internship? Yes. Some do get paid, most don’t. The main mission of the Senior Sequence is for students to do a scholarly research project while gaining some professional experience at the same time. In the process of meeting their internship requirement students are welcome to generate specific deliverables for a professional client. Each student must clock in 100 hours of “service learning” in an internship placement of their choosing. They do their internship sometime between Sept and March —-usually about 10 hours per week for ten weeks. Some students complete internships that are research-driven thereby enabling them to organize the tasks/output of their internship in ways that help meet their Senior Sequence research requirements.  Some internships pay, many do not.