YES 06: Internship

Course goals

Please note:
This course is taught in English. For Dutch speaking students, parts of the course may be offered in Dutch. See the course manual for further details.

• to be able to apply scientific knowledge in the role of academic professional in the field of Youth, Education and Society;
• to gain knowledge of the features of the organization in which you do your internship as well as the broader social context which is addressed by the organization;
• to be able to  reflect (in writing and orally) on the following areas concerning your internship on an academic level:    knowledge, analysis, intervention, method development, policy, collaboration and promoting expertise, personal and professional goals and ethics;
• to be able to develop a vision as an academic professional  in the field of Youth, Education and Society. 

Relationship between assignments and course goals
Starting point for the internship is the process acquiring an internship that suits your ambition in this academic field. In September preparatory course assignments include writing a personal and updated résumé and soliciting letter, with feedback process by peers and teacher and practicing your internship interview with feedback. The internship contains several phases with assignments, cumulating in your final internship report with your internship portfolio. Your internship supervisor at the organization as well as your university supervising internship teacher both will comment on the quality of you internship and reflection report to assess your quality of an academic professional.

Content

Each student will carry out  an internship. The internship and thesis are closely linked in the programme, see under the course description of Youth, Education and Society 07: Thesis. The organization in which you do your internship and the issues with which it deals should be relevant to the field of the Youth, Education, and Society Master; this will be determined and approved by the internship coordinator. During the internship, you will gain practical experience at an institute or organization related to one of the programme's angles of approach. You could gain experience, for example, as a researcher, policy maker or project manager. Youth, Education and Society students do internships in a range of settings, including such organizations as:

• local authorities (municipalities) or ministries (government);
• national or regional knowledge institutes (research and policy);
• university research projects (research);
• umbrella, representative or quality assurance organisations of social services ;
• the research and development department of a large youth organisation or juvenile care organization (quality assurance policy);
• research or consultancy organisation (applied  research);
• sports institutes or sport-related knowledge institutes;
• NGOs (Pedagogical International Development track);
• International institutes and centres (Pedagogical International Development track).

Youth, Education and Society students conduct their internships from February until July (blocks 3 and 4). It is also possible to do your internship at  an organization outside the Netherlands, in this case the same applies for your research in most cases. Applications for internships are submitted during block 1. In block 2, students prepare for their internships under the supervision of a teacher. The online Youth, Education and Society internship database on Brightspace is available for students wishing to explore the options for doing an internship before the start of the academic year. Information will be available on our website. Students apply for an internship in one of the following three tracks:
• Youth Policy, Education and Prevention (YEP);
• Pedagogical International Development (PID);
* Education for Inclusive Societies (EFIS).

Youth Policy, Education and Prevention is our ‘regular’ track, while Pedagogical International Development has a specific focus on International Development (see for Education for Inclusive Societies below). The main difference between these tracks is the kind of social issues you are addressing in your internship and thesis. Course work is largely similar, but students have the possibility in the assignments to focus on specific themes related to their track). Students in the regular track will mostly be working with social issues of Youth, Education and Society as related to moderns welfare states, while students who do our track Pedagogical International Development will focus on issues of Youth, Education and Society as related to International Development. For our regular track, we are working with National and local knowledge and policy organizations or research institutes, such as the Netherlands Youth Institute (NJI), the Verwey Jonker Institute, or the ministry of Education, culture and Science or the ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports. It is also possible to work with international organizations within this track.
For our track Pedagogical International Development, we are working with international partners involved in international aid, such as UNESCO, Oxfam Novib, Safe the Children or Edukans. In both tracks the possibility exists to do the internship outside of the Netherlands. Students have done their internships in both Africa, Latin America, Asia, as well as in Eastern Europe. While the programme offers internship options from our network, students might also bring in other organizations. For the track Education for Inclusive Societies we are working with a diversity of partners in the educational field. Students are invited to participate in innovative projects together with researchers, practitioners, and policy makers, in which new interventions, approaches are designed, researched, evaluated and re-designed.For this track, students also attend specific courses on the theme of their track that they follow together with students from Educational Sciences and the teacher education programme.

The purpose of an internship is to enable students to integrate their academic knowledge from the programme with practical skills. These skills will be advanced further by combining the internship with the course YES05: Youth, Education and Society: Academic Professional.