Interns in the workplace: How students perceive the value of field experience in journalism education

Most colleges and universities that offer a major in journalism require or strongly encourage their students to complete one or more internships prior to graduation. An internship, or supervised field experience, is commonly considered to be an integral part of the journalism curriculum. This study was a phenomenological inquiry into students' perceptions and attitudes regarding the value of their journalism internships.; The researcher adapted a model of transcendental phenomenology developed by Moustakas (1994) to extract data from 28 internship reports submitted by South Dakota State University students who completed their internships during the period from 1996 to 2000. The Moustakas model required the researcher to isolate expressions from each report relevant to the student's attitude toward his or her internship, to identify and validate themes, and to construct individual and composite descriptions of the internship experience.; The researcher found that almost all journalism students viewed their internship experiences in a positive light. They felt most positive about the parts of their internships that allowed them to perform meaningful tasks; that is, tasks that made a genuine contribution to their employers' products or services. They felt least positive about tedious or, in their minds, meaningless, chores. Students considered both their internship experiences and their journalism coursework to be important components of the education process. They did not express the belief that their field experiences were worth more than their academic work in the sense of educating them for careers in journalism. They indicated a perception that experiential education, in the form of internships, has an overall value. For many students, individual internship experiences validated their choice of journalism as the direction of their life work.; The essential finding of this study is that students perceive their internships as highly valuable in their education and in their development as productive citizens. The essential conclusion stemming from this finding is that the position internships occupy as an integral component of journalism education is a correct and rightful position.