Many students find the career center, which
heavily advertises its ability to help students
with finding internships, uninformative and inefficient. Without a doubt, any Mills alumna would advise getting a couple of internships under your best before you graduate. With the help of advisers from the career center, we are supposed to tackle internship opportunities armed with confidence.
Yet, upon visiting the career center, too often students are faced with a dry and unnecessary lesson on how to use the job and internship database, which often yields no results. A student is alone for majority of time when searching for internships, left to search the composer without the help the career center promises.
In addition to research and legwork of landing an internship, she also has to fill out at least three forms with the career center in order to get credit for a job.
Each form must be signed by the academic advisor, department head and the faculty internship advisor. The first form is a petition that must be filled out by the faculty internship advisor.
The second form is a petition filled out by someone from the internship. The last form is another petition filled out by the faculty internship advisor who must choose one of two options how the student will obtain credit for the internship. If it sounds superfluous and time consuming, it is. Because of conflicting time schedules, it is difficult for students to obtain required signatures and filled forms within the short time allotted by the M-center.
Finally, when all the forms are properly filled out, they are then sent to the academic standing committee. The committee may or may not approve of the student’s petition. If the committee decides not to give you credit for you internship, you are left with an internship that is obviously useless credit wise.
Too often we are left to fend for ourselves in more ways then one when it comes to internships. So what we desire is for the college to come up with clear and simple process that helps busy students, faculty members and internship heads, and eliminates all this hustle and bustle. If we’re willing to put in the work, so should the school.
