Exploring Internship Experiences of IUIU Students

Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract

Internships have become an indispensable part of students’ academic journey. This is attributed to the many benefits that the exercise offers before students can graduate and after. This paper seeks to explore IUIU students’ experiences of their internship exercise. The study focused on students of IUIU Kampala Campus and specifically those of the Faculty of Management Studies. The study reviews literature on the value of internships as well as the challenges associated with this noble exercise. The study used phone interviews to collect data from selected students as well as document analysis method by looking at the reports of the students who had just concluded the exercise. The students were selected using both simple random and purposive sampling techniques. The study established that internships mainly enabled the students to obtain hands on work experience in a real work setting. It also established that the major challenges most interns faced were adaptability to the new environment, short internship period as well as high costs of the exercise. The study recommends that the University increases on the time allocated to the exercise, enable students to acquire internship placements as well as provide some facilitation to interns to enable them smoothly go through the exercise.