Formal Service Learning Opportunities: Engineering Internships in Social Entrepreneurship Organizations

Abstract

-Over the past three years, a collaboration between the School of Engineering andComputer Science and the Global Center for Social Entrepreneurship at the University of the Pacific has provided students with internship opportunities at five different social entrepreneurship organizations distributed among six countries. The summer internship program administered by the Global Center seeks to provide an enriching experience for participants, to raise awareness of the broad application of social entrepreneurship across different disciplines, and provide qualified student assistance to organizations seeking specific help. Working with the socially entrepreneurial organization, students were required to apply problem-solving skills in environments where language, culture, technical support, and supervision were very different from levels experienced during their more 'traditional' internships in the United States. These internships in social entrepreneurship allowed students to learn first-hand that successfully implementing projects in other countries requires strong technical skills and a fundamental understanding of local cultural, political, and contextual factors. At the institutional level, lessons learned included the importance of forming strategic partnerships to increase opportunities and capitalize on limited resources, and the need to use existing frameworks to facilitate student involvement in such service-learning opportunities.

Engineering Co-op and Internship Experiences: The Roles of Workplaces, Academic Institutions and Students

“…Studies concurred that communication skills (oral and written) represented a highly important competency for engineers' professional practice [33][34][35]. However, while internship experiences generally contributed to the enhancement of the interpersonal and oral communication skills of engineering students [36,37], their contributions to writing skills were less obvious [31,32,38,39]. In a study that probed senior engineering students' knowledge about design processes, Bailey found that industrial experience made a positive difference to learning in only one knowledge areadocumentation [40].…”