Process to Develop Rewarding Natural Resources Internships

A successful natural resources internship experience is a result of good planning, execution, and follow-up. The internship can be beneficial to the student involved, the employing entity, and the sponsoring university or college. This presentation will focus on a process designed to produce rewarding internship experiences for students in natural resources disciplines. The College of Natural Resources (CNR) at Utah State University is made up of three departments: Department of Environment and Society with majors in Environmental Studies, Human Geography, Geography Teaching, and Recreation Resources Management. Department of Watershed Sciences with majors in Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, Physical Geography, and Watershed and Earth Systems. Department of Wildland Resources with majors in Conservation and Restoration Ecology, Forestry, Rangeland Resources, and Wildlife Science. Each of these disciplines lends itself to producing a valuable, hands-on learning, internship experience. Actual internship opportunities in several of these disciplines will be used to illustrate the process developed in the CNR. The process involves developing objectives for the internship experience based on, for example, the job description provided by the employer, deciding on the number of university credit hours to be awarded for the internship, the monitoring system to be used to ensure the students is doing the work agreed upon or changes in the duties do fit the internship expectations, and deciding upon the product of the internship