Offer an Internship

The academic programs offered by the Richard T. Robertson School of Media and Culture at VCU are rooted in meaningful, real-world experience. Students often begin this experience with an academic internship.

If you are a business, company, agency or media outlet interested in providing a mass communications internship, please submit an electronic, one-page job description to Maggie McDearmon, career development adviser, at mcdearmonme@vcu.edu. Please follow this Internship Description Example and include the following Information about your Robertson School internship.

Please also indicate if you are an alum of the Robertson School and from which sequence you graduated.

Requests will be evaluated and, if approved, the internship opportunity will be posted on the school’s internship listings page.

All internships must be done for credit and should be arranged through the school. Almost all students in the VCU Robertson School are required to take an internship for one to three credits. The amount of academic credit a student receives is dependent on the number of hours worked over the course of a semester:

• One credit = 50 hours worked
• Two credits = 100 hours worked
• Three credits = 150 hours worked

Students will communicate the number of internship credits they are taking that semester.

Employers are expected to:

• Complete a Student/Employer Internship Agreement that sets out the terms of the internship, including work schedule and pay (if applicable).
• Provide work that is meaningful to the student’s training as a professional. Interns should be viewed as professionals-in-training and should be assigned duties similar to those given to entry-level employees.
• Provide the intern with a supervisor who has professional experience in the specific area of a student’s internship and who is responsible for monitoring the student’s work and training.
• Provide the intern with a workspace and adequate equipment to do required work.
• Complete evaluation forms on the intern’s performance as requested by the school. Students are ultimately graded based on this evaluation.
• Schedule the student intern to work the required number of hours. Students may work more hours, but we do not recommend more than 20 hours a week during the fall and spring semesters. Internships officially start at the beginning of each semester; however, start and stop dates can be flexible by mutual agreement.
• Communicate immediately with the internship coordinator if the student is failing in his or her performance in any way.

Internship supervisors evaluate interns on their performance during the semester. To ensure the confidentiality and validity of the evaluation, a link to this evaluation will be emailed directly to the internship supervisor during the last weeks of the semester. The online evaluation must be completed in order for students to be assigned a pass/fail grade for the internship.