What am I worth in the job market?
An academic internship is your chance to test yourself in the job market during your studies. How can the knowledge you have acquired in your studies be used in practice? What specific tasks will you be given and how have your academic skills prepared you for them? You can get answers to these and other questions through an academic internship, which will also help you to start creating a network in the job market.
An academic internship means that you have to work a certain number of hours in the workplace you choose and submit a report for your degree programme, which will be given a pass/fail grade. To gain 10 ECTS credits you must work at least 248 hours (equivalent to 2 months’ full-time study) at the workplace and submit a report of no more than 10 pages. To gain 20 ECTS credits you must work at least 406 hours (equivalent to 3 months’ full-time study) at the workplace and submit a report of no more than 20 pages.
An academic internship requires a little planning
First you have to find an employer. There are links to job postings on the programme’s webpage and in SDU’s job database (Information for students at SDU -> Jobs and careers -> Jobbank -> projects and internships). You can also find a workplace on your own. You can do an internship in a wide range of workplaces, such as a public authority, an interest group, a private company or a private foundation. If you would like to do an internship abroad, you can get help from SDU’s International Office, which can also help you apply for the Erasmus grants for internships in other European countries.
Second, you have to register the academic internship at the same time as you sign up for all your other courses. You may not yet have found a workplace or arranged an internship at this time, but you still need to register it. At the same time you need to have a plan for how to obtain the last 10-20 ECTS credits required to complete the semester. You can do this in various ways:
- You can agree with the employer that you will be given time off to take one or more courses on your degree programme, so that in practice you will only be at the workplace e.g. 30 hours a week.
- You can save up extra ECTS credits by taking 40 ECTS credits in one of the previous semesters.
- You can save up extra ECTS credits by taking a summer course.
Third, you need to have an internship agreement and a supervisor agreement in place before 1 September (if you wish to do the internship in an autumn semester) or before 1 February (if you wish to do an internship in a spring semester). An internship agreement is an agreement with the internship employer concerning what you will be doing and who will be responsible for your internship at the workplace. Moreover, it should be clear from the agreement that your work is relevant to your degree. You are not allowed to receive a salary during your internship if you are gaining ECTS credits from it. You will of course receive the state education grant (SU), and you are also allowed to receive a fixed monthly payment for documented expenses such as transport, rent and telephone bills. The supervisor agreement must be made with a full-time lecturer at the Department of Political Science. The supervisor will only have responsibility for checking the academic level of the report you need to submit to pass the course. The supervisor thus has no responsibility for the work you do at the workplace.
You can read more about academic internships in the course descriptions for 10 ECTS and 20 ECTS. See them here under the course descriptions for the relevant semester.
You can read more about academic internships in this here, which answers the most common questions about academic internships.
You can find the online form here.
If you have other questions, you are welcome to contact the supervisors or the Student Information Point.