Article Gold Open Access 2020

Evaluation of an interview-based internship class in the construction management curriculum: A case study of the university of nebraska-lincoln

Education Sciences
Journal · Vol. 10 · Issue 4 · Art. 109
Abstract

Internships have been shown to be impactful tools to connect students’ learning in academia with real-world industrial needs. To help the students to get more out of their internship experience, some universities provide a summer internship class in which students do class assignments based on their experiences during their internship. There have been numerous studies on the benefits of internships. However, the benefits of a potential internship class for students in construction management (CM) programs at universities have not yet been investigated. This paper demonstrates the structure of an interview-based internship class and investigates its effectiveness. We have focused on the CM program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) as a case study. We sent online questionnaires to the intern students who took the class, students’ mentors, and the professors who taught the class. The results indicate that despite some challenges to meet the requirements of the class, the students, their mentors, and the professor found the class beneficial. The results of this paper are expected to help CM programs with the establishment and improvement of internship classes in their curriculum. © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

Keywords

Author Keywords

Internship Construction education Class assessment Interview-based internship class assignment Job market preparation

Index Keywords

Author Affiliations
Penn State College of Engineering, University Park, PA, United States
College of Engineering, Lincoln, NE, United States
Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture, Pullman, WA, United States
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, United States
Virginia Tech College of Engineering, Blacksburg, VA, United States
Funding & Acknowledgements
No funding information
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