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Center for Career Development

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Internships and Field Experience

Internships are semester-long structured pre-professional experiences designed to enrich and complement your academic program of study. Externships are shorter pre-professional experiences ranging from a few days to several weeks - with the focus being specific project work. Both internships and externships are for academic credit with the number of credits determined by the academic supervisor. The Center can also arrange for Informational Interviews with professionals in a given field and Job Shadowing, experiences which can offer invaluable insights into any given particular career.

How Internships and Other Field Experiences Benefit Students

      The benefits of participating in one or more pre-professional experiences during your studies at UC are multifaceted.

• The experience provides a context for career readiness which involves exploring potential vocational possibilities to form short and long-term career goals tailored to your individual talents and interests. You will be able to "try on" a career before you feel the pressures to choose a certain career path due to previous training and financial commitments.
  
  
• An internship or externship can help you discover the links that tie classroom learning to 'real-world' workplace knowledge and increase your motivation to learn even more, as well as have access to resources that are not available on campus.
  
  
• You will discover much about yourself. Understanding what you don't like in the workplace is as valuable to know as realizing what you do. You will develop self-confidence, maturity, and human relations skills in your new pre-professional role. You will be exposed to problem solving in new and challenging ways. You will develop ethical insights in observing the problems in making decisions in complex environments. You will realize and enjoy greater clarity about career decisions and be at the forefront of planning your life after graduation.
  
  
• You will have the opportunity to demonstrate strong interests and your talents to a prospective employer. You will be able to assess and build requisite career-related skills and abilities. You will establish a work history, build a network of professional contacts, have the opportunity to observe and analyze diverse professional environments.

Recent UC internship sites include:

American Association of Retired People American Cancer Society Arnett and Foster P.L.L.C BB&T The Charleston Civic Center The Charleston Gazette The Charleston Daily Mail The Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences Digital Vision Works Division of Criminal Justice

 Quality pre-professional experiences that encourage you to think deliberately about your fieldwork, before during and after it occurs - markedly increases your professional choices and opportunities. The Center for Career Development has designed the Internship and Field Experiential Program to assist you in exploring career choices by providing you with structures to create, experience, and integrate a valuable pre-professional experience as part of your undergraduate education.