Getting Critical with International Internships

by Bill Robertson Geibel

International academic internship programs are on the rise (Di Pietro, 2022) and it is not hard to see why. What modern, multitasking student concerned about their future wouldn’t find the prospect of studying abroad while gaining academic credit and professional experience attractive? This was on my mind in 2020, when I designed my first internship-study abroad program. At that time, I was driven by a desire to create an educational opportunity that nurtured students’ professional and global competencies, and with any luck, could play a role in preparing the next generation of global citizens to make a positive impact on the world. 

However, after my first year teaching the program, my lofty ambitions, as you might have expected, were dramatically tempered. Yes, students had gained important skills, such as navigating international professional settings or negotiating multicultural interactions, but had I moved them any closer to being the kind of global citizens and leaders that would bring about a more peaceful and just world? I couldn’t say for certain. 

Then it hit me. I was so focused on teaching students to be successful in the world as it exists today, in their internships and the economic and political realities of the moment, that I had forgotten that fundamental to any change is a vision of what the world could or even should look like and a belief that we can do something about it. In other words, my program lacked an essential criticality — one that forced students to not just think of their own professional success, but the larger economic, political, and social implications of their success. 

In the years since, I have developed some strategies to ensure (as best I can) that my international internship program is not reifying systems of inequality and injustice in the service of professional success, but is stimulating students’ critical consciousness to think about how they can use their success as means to enact needed change in their professions, and as a result, truly help change the world for the better. I share them below in the hopes that they might provide guidance for educators in similar situations or who might also have the familiar feeling of “am I doing enough?”

1. Frame the program around global citizenship and civic professionalism 

Global citizenship (GC) is often used to frame study abroad programs because it is “all about encouraging young people to develop the knowledge, skills and values they need to engage with the world. And it’s about the belief that we can all make a difference” (Oxfam, nd). However, in my own opinion, its relative lack of specificity, abstractness, and focus on the individual result in it being less useful and accessible to students engaging in a very specific, professionally focused international experience. Which is why I pair GC with civic professionalism (CP), which centralizes students’ career and professional choices as practical avenues through which they can contribute to the betterment of the world. Campus Compact defines a civic professional as those who:

see the public nature of their work not as an add-on, but rather as a defining feature of their professional identity. Sometimes referred to as democratic professionals or citizen professionals, civic professionals make the connections between work and democratic citizenship explicit. They focus their professional energy on a public mission and use their technical competence to advance broader social purposes (Longo, 2023)

Combining these two concepts creates a robust framework through which students can begin to analyze not only their place in the world, but to understand how their career choices and professional paths have larger implications in the world.  

2. Emphasize personal reflection 

Before students can truly engage with, critically analyze, or impact the world in any intentional way, they must first have a clear understanding of their own identity, including their own assumptions, values, and perspectives. In my program we spend the first two weeks exploring these topics using a variety of prompts and tools, and only once this has been completed do we turn our gaze to analyze the outside world. To this end, I have found the following resources/tools helpful.

• Identity Wheel: An identity wheel is a common tool in many social justice oriented or community engaged courses, however, I think it is equally as valuable in study abroad courses. An identity wheel allows students to begin to think their many identity markers and the ways in which those inform their own perspectives and experiences. 
• Career Matrix: This is an activity that aims to get students thinking about their identities in the context of career exploration. I find it very helpful as a transition between talking about “who we are” to “what we do (or want to do).”

3.  Facilitate critical thinking: 

My last tip is one that many of you likely already do (i.e. facilitate critical thinking) however, it comes with a small twist. Instead of asking students to critically explore topics related to their internships, for example, a banking intern writing a report on the 2008 financial collapse in Greece, I ask my students to also critically analyze their internships and their professional fields. By asking them to turn a critical eye towards their chosen career paths, they are forced to grapple with both the good and bad aspects of their chosen field. Spoiler: every field has good and bad impacts on the world! For example, I will ask students to assess what values their internship promotes or diagram what impacts (both good and bad) their internship/field has on the world. At the end of the program, I ask students to write a memo to their internship supervisor or CEO, that constructive critiques specific practices and provides suggestions on how to remedy any negative impacts of their current work. (Don’t worry, they don’t actually have to share it with their supervisor!). By challenging students to be critical about topics so close to themselves, through written assignments like this one or simply through group discussions, I have found that their abilities to critically analyze the world around them, including the content of their courses, is greatly enhanced. 

These are some of the strategies and insights I have gained in my pursuit of creating an international internship for my students that does more than train them to succeed in an unjust and unequal world. Will all my students go on to become the type of global citizens and changemakers that change the world, who knows, but I can now say with a degree of certainty that they have the critical and analytical skills necessary to try.


Bill Robertson Geibel is a faculty member and the Associate Director of Experiential Learning at UC San Diego’s Sixth College as well as a former Early Career Research Fellow at GlobalEd. 

References

Di Pietro, G. (2022). International internships and skill development: A systematic review. Review of Education, Volume 10, Issue 2.

Longo, N. (2023). Practicing Democracy: A Toolkit for Educating Civic Professionals. Campus Compact.

What is global citizenship?. Oxfam GB. (n.d.).