Weekly Reflective Journal: Internship Experience

Weekly Reflective Journal: Guidelines

A Reflective Journal is a key element of the internship class. Each student will keep a weekly journal of his/her internship experience.

PROCESS AND FORMAT

• Entries must be dated and should run around 250-500 words (1-2 pages). 
• If you didn’t actually work, say so -- but still provide thoughts as you reflect on your overall experiences.  (This might be the case with your first entry: the struggle to find an internship?)
• Not required, but feel free to make your journal more interesting by including photos or other media, or links to projects you’ve worked on.
• Create one Microsoft Word or RTF document and add to it each week so that all entries are in the same document. 

Each week, put the most recent entry at the top of the document – so the entries are in order with the earliest post at the bottom of the document.  This means you’ll always be able to look at your current and previous entries in one document to reflect week by week.

• Final Journal Entry:  When you have completed your work hours, make this clear at the top of the first page of your journal.  Then notify your instructor in the Comments section of the assignment and via email.  When later journals are due, do not upload anything -- just type in “Hours completed on __date__” in the Comments section of the journal assignment on Canvas.

For your last journal entry, feel free to include photos, media, or links (if any) to the work you were involved in, and briefly describe the role you played in the project.  Or you can upload these separately on Canvas by using the “re-submit” option on the assignment.  (Canvas saves all of your submissions – but you need to point out to me in the “comments” box that you’ve uploaded the items because they’re hard to spot easily in Canvas.)

If you finish your hours and journal before the end of the semester:  For the last journal assignment due at the end of the class, upload again your journal (the one you submitted previously).  Along, of course, with the usual "hours completed on ___date___" in the comments section.

 CONTENT

• Journal entries should be both factual and reflective narratives about your internship experiences that identify what you are learning and relate it to bigger issues.

-->Factual: i.e. WHAT have you been doing? 

-->Reflective: i.e. What have you learned?  What skills are you developing?  What problems have you encountered?  What could be improved? How does this relate to bigger issues or other experiences?  and so on.

--> Here are some issues to consider when reflecting on your internship experience: 

Remember, each entry should include what you did that week at the internship (factual), as well as reflections on your experiences (reflective).

• Professional skills: What are you doing?  What new skills are you developing? What are you learning about this industry?  How does your experience relate to your study of media and communications?  What did you learn (or not) in a class that is useful on site and vice versa? What will you take away from this internship?  What transferable skills are you building?  Skills can be technical –e.g. Excel or Final Cut -- or more general – e.g. work demeanor, interpersonal communication, self-discipline, etc.
• Understanding the Organization: What are you being asked to do and how does that work fit into the overall work of the organization?  What is the “product” of your organization and who are its clients or audience?  Who works there?  Who doesn’t?  What kinds of backgrounds to they have?  How is your workplace organized?  Is it a hierarchical organization or a more democratic one?
• Ethics and Values at Work: What are some of the tensions or issues in your field?  Do these dilemmas come up in everyday work?  In conversations?  Are your coworkers ethically reflective?  What kinds of issues or value questions do they face?  Have you faced any ethical issues in your internship?  Does your organization have clear values (perhaps a mission statement or ethics policy)?  Do people follow these stated ethical codes?