ACADEMIC ASSIGNMENTS: Things to do
which make your Internship more scholarly

    Below are some of the things which represent ways to integrate your academic preparation with your internship experience. These supplement the kinds of things covered in Guidelines to the Final Paper, and should be construed as activities you might want to engage in on your own to make your experience more enjoyable and profitable.

• Analyze which groups of people (factions or cliques) treat you as an outsider or "spy" and which groups of people are fairly open and feel non-threatened with you.
• Reflect in your own mind how long it took for you to begin seeing things "as they really are".
• Observe any discrepancies between the goals of the agency and its practices. Think about their role in society from a critical perspective.
• By drawing a map of the agency, determine how many walls or dividers cut the public off from view; how much of this is necessary for security reasons, and how much of it is just being cold and impersonal.
• Choose somebody in the agency to interview (even a client if you want), and explain to them it is voluntary and there will be no repercussions. Prepare some standard interview questions.
• Read up on supervision styles of managers, and determine which style is being used in your agency.
• Analyze the promotional system of the agency. This is something most people are glad to share. Figure out which career paths are the "golden roads" to promotion.
• Conduct an "efficiency" audit, suggest ways to eliminate red tape and paperwork. Examine the flow of communication; is it more vertical or horizontal?
• Describe the formal structure of the organization and the informal structure. What are the norms for a fair day's work? How does this jibe with formal expectations of workload?
• Consider how the agency fits into relationships with other agencies, and try to determine if this constitutes a criminal justice "network" or "system". See the graphic below which shows what a social service network looks like.
• Assess the future career plans of other employees, using the advice they give as a way to update your resume and get tips on being in "the right place at the right time."