Internships

The following feature story appeared in the campus publication MOSAIC in May, 2000. Although some courses, students, and faculty members referenced in the story may have changed, it still provides a full and accurate picture of the Internship program. For current course information and a faculty listing we encourage you to visit the program's homepage.

Gaining practical experience and rare insight into career choices

Courtroom proceedings involving at-risk juveniles are complicated and confidential. But, thanks to an innovative academic internship, Nilda Rodriguez ‘00, who aspires to be a family law attorney, has acquired the specialized knowledge of an insider. A participant in Trinity’s CityTerm internship program, the political science major worked virtually full-time at a nonprofit legal advocacy organization this spring. She spent two days a week sifting through court documents and two days in sessions of the Hartford Superior Court for Juvenile Matters, where she monitored cases of child neglect, abuse, and foster care. Without the internship, she says, "I would never have known how the process actually works, because these are closed cases."

Like Rodriguez, many Trinity students are finding that internships offer behind-the-scenes perspectives, supply real data for theses and other academic work, and provide experiences that profoundly influence career and life decisions. Trinity offers a wide variety of internship opportunities, and students are taking advantage of them in large numbers. According to Director of Internship Programs Anne Lundberg, more than 150 students performed internships in nearly 100 public, nonprofit, and private organizations during the spring semester, and placements range from the attorney general’s office, to the Parkville Revitalization Project, to PaineWebber, Real Art Ways, and Connecticut Public Television and Radio. And students are doing important work. In her internship at the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, art history major Newell P. Gates ’01 worked several hours a week with the curator and director of education to design an orientation room for visitors. Fernando G. Borghese ’01, a political science major with a minor in formal organizations, was an intern at the Yankee Institute, a free-market think tank that advocates

Newell Gates '01 (left) reviews photos for a visitor orientation exhibit with the Hill-Stead Museum's Director of Education and Curatorial Services Cynthia Cormier.
	Ben Cella '01 helps to promote the Hartford Wolf Pack hockey team

voluntary solutions to public policy issues. His research into the homework policy in Hartford schools — which included interviewing school principals and the president of Hartford’s Parent and Teacher Organization, conducting a survey at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Hartford, and investigating school policies posted on-line — addresses educational difficulties in the state’s most beleaguered school district.

Anchored in academics
While students often take on internships with prospective careers in mind, internships at Trinity have always been anchored in the academic curriculum. In 1967, Professor of Political Science Clyde D. McKee, Jr. began teaching a senior seminar on state government and sought a way to bring students in direct contact with government. McKee negotiated with the state legislature’s house minority leader for hands-on staff jobs, office space, and access to the Republican caucus for his students. Thus was born the Trinity Legislative Internship Program, marking the beginning of experiential, community-based learning as a formal and integrated part of the educational offerings at Trinity.

The central internship office now offers more than 200 established placements in which students work one-on-one with a faculty sponsor and an on-site supervisor. Students must complete a significant project or paper that allows for in-depth examination of the experience and draws upon related readings. In addition, internships have been incorporated in other curricular initiatives. For example, interdisciplinary minors, including Human Rights and Studies in Progressive American Social Movements, require an internship experience; Trinity’s global learning sites in Cape Town and Trinidad, for example, incorporate internship opportunities as part of the required community learning component of the study-abroad experience; and specialized programs, such as CityTerm and Health Fellows, feature internships that allow for intensive study of a particular field.

Dean of Faculty Miller Brown observes that internships lend themselves nicely to Trinity’s liberal arts educational philosophy. "The key to high-quality internships is the right combination of experiential, practical learning and basic academic preparation and study," he says. "The payoff for students is double: what they find off-campus is enriched by careful study of the fields related to their internship experience; what they find in their academic work is made practical and realistic as they apply it to their engagement with others."

The internship experience of James M. Baird ’00, an English major, demonstrates how educational elements can cohere. Baird’s internship in Trinidad this spring was at a "Mas camp," where he made costumes for children to wear during the national Carnival season of parades, music, and costume competitions. Participation in Carnival is perhaps the most important form of cultural expression in Trinidad, and Baird has studied books about Carnival by Trinidadians and academics from other countries, including Trinity Professor of English Milla Riggio, a noted expert on Carnival. He has also delved into fictional accounts of Mas camps and written various analytical papers on the subject. For his senior thesis, he described how the leader of his Mas camp, who came from one of the poorest sections of Trinidad, became one of the most respected artists in Trinidad through his work as a Carnival costume maker. Baird says the internship and the case study "gave me a clear indication of how one culture is using art in a commercial way."

Group learning

Health Fellow William Yorns, Jr. '01 reviews CT and MRI
scans with his mentor Dr. Francis DiMario at the Connecticut Children's Medical Center.

Some internship options capitalize on group learning, with faculty providing more direction and instruction. The Legislative Internship Program, the Health Fellows Program, and CityTerm all combine internships with intensive weekly seminars and other required activities in which students learn from each other’s experiences. The Formal Organizations interdisciplinary minor offers the option of doing the required internship in conjunction with a seminar that explores ethics in formal organizations. Students write weekly papers that are critiqued by their classmates and then reviewed with on-site supervisors. Anne Y. Sawyer ’00, who worked for the O’Neal and Prelle advertising agency, says that talking with other students about their internship experiences gave her more insight into a number of possible careers and broadened her understanding of workplace ethics. She says, "I learned a lot from the issues that other people brought in to discuss."

Beyond the semester’s work
Though they are structured to fit into a semester, internships offer benefits that spiral outward from the original experience. Students in the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program in New York City, for example, routinely report that their internship experiences lead to connections that help them land summer jobs in the arts in the city. Last year’s crop of Health Fellows, whose health-care related internships require significant research projects, included some students who presented their work at national conferences and others who continued their work with on-site supervisors to complete papers to be published in national professional journals. For several students interning at the Yankee Institute this spring, one goal was to research and write an op-ed essay about a particular issue, such as education or publicly financed projects. Getting published, notes their sponsor, Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of Economics Gerald A. Gunderson, is "quite a coup for an undergraduate."

For many students, though, the benefits go beyond résumé-building and extend into the realm of personal enrichment. Due to her experiences as an intern in obstetrics at Hartford Hospital, former Health Fellow Katherine E. Sutula ’00 chose to become a doula, a caregiver trained to assist mothers in labor. Nilda Rodriguez has been formally trained as a guardian ad litem, a volunteer who is appointed by the court to be a child’s advocate in a particular case. Jamie Baird notes that he and other Trinity students in Trinidad "were able to have a positive impact on the community," a phenomenon that has had life-changing results for him. "I’m leaving for Trinidad the day after graduation," he says, noting that he plans to continue his involvement with the community and write fiction. "I’ll stay for at least a year, and possibly for the rest of my life."

-Leslie Virostek