The Pre-Graduate and Professional School Career Community includes campus partners who support students in their desire to pursue graduate and professional education. Key partners include: 
•    FSU Pre-Health & Pre-Med Advising Team
•    FSU Pre-Law Advising Team 
•    The Graduate Enrollment Team
•    The Office of Graduation Planning and Strategies (Degree in Three and More in Four programs)
•    The Office of Graduate Fellowships and Awards (Graduate Student Ambassadors)

If you provide pre-graduate and/or pre-professional school advising please reach out to Megan Crowe (m.crowe@fsu.edu) to be included in meetings and conversations surrounding advising resources and events, as well as tracking and reporting student advising contacts.

The Internship Council includes campus stakeholders facilitating student engagement in experiential learning opportunities and high-impact practices. We meet each semester to share resources and dialogue on maximizing Florida State student learning through internships.

Alternate Assignments 

The Career Center can collaborate with you to provide alternate career development assignments to internship students to meet your class work site hour requirements, such as: 

• ProfessioNole Ready: The Career Center’s online professional development program, which can be integrated into Canvas courses, is a series of interactive learning activities that will help students build the skills employers and graduate school admissions committees want. 

  • After completion, students earn a digital badge which can be shared with you in addition to future employers or graduate admissions committees to showcase their level of career readiness and completed work assignment. 

  • Completion of the total certificate program includes 14 modules and will take approximately 70 hours providing students with professional development, along with the ability to identify the transferable skills they gained from their experiential learning opportunity. In addition, you can allow students to complete some or all the modules, approximating 5 hours per module depending on their specific number of outstanding work hours. 

• ProfessioNole Pathways and Badges (Folio): ProfessioNole Pathways is a student’s roadmap for acquiring new skills and competencies and provide students the ability to display and demonstrate these skills to potential employers and graduate admissions committees.  With ProfessioNole Pathways, students can see both big-picture objectives and real-time progress as they earn badges displaying their work and accomplishments. As students meet milestones along a ProfessioNole Pathway, the badges they earn are deposited into their Folio, immediately providing proof of their accomplishments, and demonstrating their ProfessioNole Competencies. 

  • Faculty can utilize Folio several ways including creating a Folio to showcase work by linking courses and assignments, adding Folio as a class assignment, or by creating a badging opportunity or pathway. 
    • Add Folio to your Canvas Navigation Menu 
    • Link a Canvas assignment to Folio 
    • Grading Linked Assignments  
    • Link an Entire Canvas Course  
    • Viewing Course Grades 

• Mock Interviews:

  • Big Interview: A virtual interview preparation system, students will get hands-on practice with mock interviews tailored to specific industry/career field, job function, and experience level in addition to viewing interview preparation modules. You can customize interviews for your students using this platform and recordings of the practice interviews can be emailed to you or uploaded to your Canvas course site. 

• Career Advising: The FSU Career Center is here to help our students and alumni make informed career decisions, connect with employers, pursue further education, and develop their professional lives and goals from a distance. 

  • Resume Review: Students can get their resume reviewed with their Spring 2020 internship added through drop-in virtual career advising with either their College’s specialized Career Liaison or with a Career Advisor. Your student can then upload a critiqued and final resume to your Canvas course site or email it to you. 
    • Faculty are also able to embed a resume, cover letter or graduate school admissions essay assignment directly into their courses utilizing the Career Docs Canvas course enrollment link. 
  • Planning for their Next Step: Students can meet with either their College’s Career Liaison or with a Career Advisor to create an individualized action plan for either post-graduation employment or graduate school as well as continued engagement in experiential learning. 

• Information Interviews: Students can complete information interviews with Alumni and Friends of Florida State through our online mentoring platform, ProfessioNole Mentors. 

  • Students can identify and match with potential mentors on a number of dimensions, such as college major, collegiate involvement type, career interests, career fields, company/organization or disclosed demographical information. 
  • Students can email you or upload a screen shot or transcript of their information interview conversation as well as a reflection on their conversation including what they learned from them. 

In addition, two popular alternate career development assignments include written reflection and LinkedIn Learning:  

• Written Reflection:  Students can complete a reflection on their internship experience. Reflections can include a discussion of how they met their learning outcomes, skills developed, how this internship has helped shape their career goals, relation to academic coursework, etc. using an outline: 

  • Section 1 – Introduction 

    • Profile-Your name, internship job title, company/organization, dates of internship 

    • About Me- Include why you chose to apply for and pursue your specific internship and company/organization, and the process of securing the internship opportunity 

  • Section 2 – What You Did 

    • Company/Organization Profile – Create a short biography of the company including products/services provided and company mission 

    • Include a Team Profile – Size of the team you worked on, supervision structure, overview of your colleagues, how your team contributed to the overall mission of the organization/company 

    • Onboarding – Share the onboarding/orientation process for your internship 

    • Responsibilities and Projects – Describe your specific internship responsibilities, your regular work activities, and any individual projects or assignments you worked on. Share how your internship responsibilities contributed to your team’s goals and objectives 

  • Section 3 – What You Learned 

    • Academics- What knowledge of your major and/or career field you learned on-campus proved most valuable during your internship?  In what ways were you able to apply what you have learned in your academic coursework to your internship? 

    • Skill Development- What transferable skills did you develop through your experience? Have you identified any skills or areas that you would like to further develop? 

    • Growth- What pushed you outside of your comfort zone? Or, what was the biggest challenge you encountered? What new ideas or questions were raised as a result of this experience? What was the most important thing you learned about yourself? 

    • Goals and Accomplishments- What was your greatest accomplishment or reward? In light of this internship experience, how have your professional goals evolved? 

  • Section 4 –  Your Next Steps 

    • Actions-In view of your answers in Section 3, identify the specific actions that you will take in the next 30 days to move your career preparation forward.  

• LinkedIn Learning (formerly known as Lynda.com): FSU maintains a subscription to LinkedIn Learning for students, recent graduates, faculty and staff providing unlimited access to 13,000+ online videos taught by industry experts covering a vast array of business skills and professional certificates.  Certificates of Completion are certifications for courses completed on LinkedIn Learning. Upon completion of a course, a certificate is automatically generated that can be viewed and shared online. Students can email completion certificates to you directly or upload the completion certificate to your Canvas course site. 

Parker Dewey

Innovative companies across industries are using Micro-Internships to identify, connect, engage, and hire high potential college students and recent graduates.

Forage

Forage is an open access platform designed to unlock exciting careers for students by connecting them with our company-endorsed Virtual Work Experience Programs. By completing a Forage Virtual Internship you will:

• Better understand the diverse and exciting career pathways available to you; and
• Build the skills and confidence that will set you up for success as you move from the world of study to the world of work

Best Practices for Virtual Internships 

By offering virtual internships, organizations can recruit, interview, and hire interns from across the country instead of limiting their search for candidates within driving distance or those with the ability and means to relocate for an opportunity. As a result, students who previously may not have had access to opportunities may now have a unique opportunity to work with a “dream” or “reach” employer.

Below is a collection of articles discussing the adoption of virtual internships available through the FSU Library subscriptions service: 

• Online experiential learning: Engaging students through real and virtual activities 
• Creating win-win-win experiences: When do virtual internships really work? 
• Distance earning: 6 steps for making digital internships work 
• The case for virtual internships: Downloadable white paper 
• Integrating virtual internships into online classrooms 
• Work: Graduate: How to get on by logging on: For many students, finding the time and money to undertake office-based placements can often be prohibitive. So are virtual internships the answer? 

How to Ensure Success in Virtual Internships  

Before approving virtual internships, your main concern as an academic internship course instructor may revolve around structure, supervision and the quality of assignment projects.  Like you, most internship providers are aiming to provide the same level of instruction, support, supervision, and mentorship for an online intern as they would have for a student reporting to work at an office for a traditional face-to-face experiential learning environment.  As with your traditional internship set-up, communicate to your internship site supervisors' clear expectations. You can do this by providing examples or templates and establishing set timelines for required components of the internship. Periodic virtual check-ins can help you, your student intern, and your site supervisor maintain open line of communication while they work remotely, and help students build professional communication skills in a new mode of professional practice.  

Best Practices for Virtual Internship Course Instruction: 

• Agree on detailed internship description including expectations, duties/responsibilities and defined learning outcomes with your Student Intern, Internship Site Supervisor, and Course Faculty. 
• Expect the Internship Site to provide an accessible project management tool (i.e. Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive or Hightail) that is shared and will allow Site Supervisors to monitor the Student Intern’s work and provide feedback. 
• Require the Internship Site must provide the Student Intern with a guided on-boarding/orientation session as well as an off-boarding interview. 
• Require the Internship Site Supervisor and Student Intern must create a system to track hours worked (e.g. timesheets in MS Excel stored in a shared drive) that can be periodically reported to the Course Faculty. 
• Require agreement by the Internship Site Supervisor and Student Intern to schedule ways for ongoing virtual communications (i.e. weekly email or video reports) in addition to a mutually beneficial way for students to ask questions, and/or discuss challenges or problems.  
• Require the Internship Site Supervisor to include the Student Intern in team meetings, organizational meetings and professional development sessions when appropriate. 
• Expect the Internship Site Supervisor and Student Intern to schedule pre-set, ongoing supervision meetings to discuss project planning, progress reviews, and for constructive feedback. 
• Require the Internship Site Supervisor to schedule and conduct both a mid-semester and end-of-experience student evaluation. 

• Heather Athey, College of Arts & Sciences
• Rebecca Sage, Center for Global Engagement
• Garret Tumlin, College of Business
• Stephanie Vivirito, College of Communication & Information
• Bayard Stern, University Communications
• Nicole Abuid, FAMU-FSU College of Engineering