Closer to the Professional Setting
By Christina Testa UA’23, 25 and Jim Stellar
CT is in her second semester of her 2-year MPH degree program in Public Health in Epidemiology, and she is feeling the development of professionalism. This is particularly true as she heads into an programmatically planned internship in her field this summer. As she gets closer to diving into the professional setting full-time, she is getting a better sense of what it means to be successful in the real world working as an Epidemiologist in Public Health, and that depends on her experiences.
Before going into them, we have to say that there is research on this topic. Consider the following four papers that CT reviewed.
This first paper describes the importance of an internship in the transition to the professional setting. As described in the paper, internships are a critical element in determining career success. These reasons being that internships are an extension of what is learned in the classroom and directly allows the student to apply the knowledge learned in the classroom. The knowledge and skills are transferable to the professional setting. The internship is a good way to get a taste of the professional world with a start and end date, and clearly defined learning objectives. This paper also describes the importance of an internship because it offers a new lens into their field of study. In relation to Public Health, it is important for students to gain an internship and apply the concepts learned in school in order to become a professional in their careers. Public Health is a broad field that focuses on helping large populations in relation to health and wellbeing. Having an internship experience will connect the student to the real work applications of what it means to be a professional in Public Health.
Another example is in this second paper that describes a study conducted on the student’s engagement in an internship and the impact it has on the health professional’s career after. This study was done on 12 students in masters degree programs in nursing who had internships. The results of the qualitative analysis showed that emotions, behaviors, and awareness contributed to the engagement process. Overall, “growing through relationship” category was a crucial role in the relation network building while in the internship experience. As said in that paper, “The results of this study underline the crucial role of students’ engagement in the internship experience in favouring both better learning outcomes and perspective professional success and wellbeing.”
This third paper looked at the outcome of internships on Public Health professionals. It highlights from a career development perspective, how internships provide unique opportunities to develop professional networks, practice competencies learned in school, gain experience in new professional environments, and share lessons learned within the field with others. The growth of academic and professional development is emphasized through the role of internships in the Public Health field
Finally, this final Public Health paper we will discuss here, highlights how from population health research through Public Health, internships are valued by the industry as they improve Public Health policies and actions. These internship experiences train new Public Health workers on how to solve and improve complex Public Health issues/concerns. This was a qualitative study and was a phone semi-structured interview study as well as a face-to-face interview style study. This study found through the interview process that internships provided an opportunity for trainees to interact with knowledge-user partners and assess the gap between research and practice. Furthermore, effective mentorship was key to the success of the interns in understanding Public Health realities and when developing Public Health intervention research skills. The findings suggest that Public health internships facilitate trainee engagement, applied Public Health research, and real world understanding of complex Public Health related issues.
Overall, after this brief review, these papers all suggest that internships are a key experience when preparing to become a professional.In order to be prepared for the professional world, it is important to experience a professional setting through internships especially in the Public Health field. Studying and improving health in populations requires there to be an exceptional degree of professionalism and knowledge on Public Health issues and concerns. Having the experience of an internship will allow the student to gain these necessary skills to be applied in the professional setting.
This brief review fits with a larger literature showing that internships increases earnings, and that fits with an experience from 20 years ago when JS was Dean of Arts and Sciences at Northeastern University, a cooperative educational institution that claimed a general job placement rate of 95% on or just after graduation. The idea in the College of Arts and Sciences was that it applied to all fields, not just in the medical and the public health fields, and that it was due to the students having had these work-place experiences. They had the maturity, problem-solving, and other professional skills that regular college students did not have. In this blog series, we think that this maturity is because the direct experiences allowed a kind of gut-level learning (emotional) that complemented and reinforced the fact-and-theories learning (cognitive) that occurred due to the classroom.
Next, we will write about CT’s experience on her internship in Public Health and the lessons learned from the point of view of that experience.
