Scourfield McLauchlan, Incorporating Internships into Undergraduate Political Science Coursework, Page 4
INTRODUCTORY LEVEL COURSE: American National Government
At the University of South Florida St. Petersburg (USFSP), American National Government is an
introductory level, required course, not only for Political Science majors, but for a variety of
other majors on campus as well. During the Fall 2004 semester, all students were required to
intern on a campaign.
1
The internship component was worth twenty percent of students’ final
grade. The requirements included the following:
work twenty-five hours on a political
campaign, keep a journal detailing internship experiences and lessons learned, write a five-page
paper about the internship experience, keep a log of hours worked at the placement (and have the
supervisor initial the hours), and return an evaluation of student performance filled out by the
internship supervisor.
2
We integrated the internship experience into the course material – this
was not simply an add-on to the regular lecture material and readings.
During the third week of the semester, I invited representatives from every campaign to
come and speak to the class. The campaign staffers spoke to the entire class, and then, at the
conclusion of all of the presentations, they met with interested students one-on-one.
This
individual time with the campaign staffers, prior to final selection of their internship placements,
allowed the students to ask their potential supervisor questions and to get a sense of the kinds of
projects on which they would be working. As I learned in the Pre-Internship Surveys, only four
students had previous campaign experience. Most students found the prospect of working on a
campaign to be daunting, and they had no idea how to go about getting involved in such an
activity. Meeting with their potential supervisors helped ease the students’ anxiety.
1
In the event that students were unable to intern on one of the campaigns, they were permitted to substitute a
research paper in lieu of the internship requirement. Three students in the class took the research paper option.
2
My syllabus for American National Government is included in Appendix I.
Convention