Exploring the Process and Effectiveness of a Graduate Internship Program at Chung-Yuan Christian University

• Main Authors: Ying-Ying Chen, 陳盈穎
• Other Authors: Ru-Yu Wang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2012
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/12514131425127859107

碩士 === 中原大學 === 企業管理研究所 === 100 === In the industry, the human resources the company need are the people who not only have academic knowledge but also have good interpersonal and practical skill. However, most of the business education has focused on developing functional abilities of the students. And they are often scrutinized and criticized by its lack of relevance to the real world. Therefore, many business schools tried to adopt some teaching methods in order to narrow the gap between the theory and the practice. One of the ways is “internship”. What is internship? It is an on the job training program which integrate the theory and the real world. It seems that the inclusion of internships into the post-secondary curriculum is a trend. Surprisingly, there’s little research on this topic .Moreover, there’s fewer research about doing an internship program in the graduate school. Hence, this research has been started to fill this gap. In this research, an internship program of Chung-Yuan Christian University will be used as a case and its process and effectiveness which include difficulties and advantages will be explored. Consequently, in order to get a more complete picture about what actually happened in the process of the internship program, the important tripartite-the students, the supervisors and the mentors will be interviewed and triangulated. Through interviewing with three part stakeholders in this curriculum, it appears that interns, mentors, and supervisors have different views on the internship. And these differences seem to come from different expectation and orientation of the internship. Interns are inclined to see the internship as work in order to feel the atmosphere of workplace. However, the mentors and supervisors regard internship as education. Therefore, it results in discrepancy on internship time, internship location, compensation, and the ways of internship. Yet, it is worth mentioning that when the interns expect to participate in real jobs, they didn’t willing to face. Besides, there seems to be serious communication problems between the people involved in this research. The interns were afraid to explain their problem to the mentors when facing problem at work. The supervisors also found it difficult to communicate with the mentors about the requirement of the program and the problems the students had, because they are afraid that the relationship will be violated. It is suggested that if the effectiveness of the program is to be increased, there is a need for a better communication. Also, it appears that the interns who have positive attitude and self-initiative might learn more from the internship and have better internship experience. It is hoped that the findings of this research can contribute to the business schools, the governor of schools and professors who want to set up internship course in order to increase the effectiveness of internship program in the future.