Benefits and Advice on Making the Most of this Opportunity

When I began my career at Utah Valley University thirteen years ago, one of the first requests I made was for a budget to hire a student intern. In college, I benefited from editorial internships and after graduation, whenever possible, hired student interns when in management positions. Utah Valley University, with its open admissions model and focus on undergraduate education, is uniquely positioned to offer research and internship opportunities to undergraduate students who want to have an engaged learning experience that will give them real-world skills.

The UVU Policy Office offers engaged learning opportunities for student interns from UVU ‘s editing or political science programs. The Policy Office’s purpose is twofold: (1) To manage the policy review process and shepherd policy owners through it and (2) to ensure the editorial quality of university policy by making policy language clear and accessible.

How the Policy Office Benefits from Interns

Some of the ways our office benefits from interns are:

• Eliminating backlogged projects and administrative tasks
  
• Utilizing unique and invaluable perspectives
  
• Understanding what students are experiencing and thinking
• Fostering potential future employment relationships

The interns we have hired from UVU’s editing program came trained in the use of The Chicago Manual of Style, in the science of proofreading, and in the art and craft of editing. Those we hired from our political science program came with data and research skills for which our editors may not have been trained.

Our interns leave our office a better place. Here are some examples:

• Two political science interns helped us develop a format for policy research briefs; these briefs were designed in mind with the time demands placed on university leadership. These interns also helped us standardize our policy research procedures.
  
  
• One editorial intern graduated and became our first full-time editor. She introduced many major improvements into our business processes, such as the concept of policy mapping and moving many manual processes onto MS Teams/SharePoint.
  
  
• Another editorial intern assisted our senior editor with developing our writer’s guide.

Designing Your Internship Program

To determine how your office could benefit from using a student intern, assess the needs of your office. Start with the role and function of your office. For the UVU Policy Office, this was fairly simple. We do not write policy; we edit policy drafts to ensure clarity and accessibility, shepherd policy owners through the development and review process, and ensure policies are developed in accordance with our shared governance model. Therefore, it was appropriate for us to hire interns with editing or policy research skills.

The next step is to decide how many hours a week we could budget for and what tasks our interns would perform. Initially, our internship was funded for only 10 hours per week; later, it was funded for 15 to 20 hours per week. The increased hours really helped our office, as well as helping to support a student working their way through university! This hour range also helps our interns gain more meaningful experience with us.

Depending on Policy Office needs for the current academic year, we assign our intern administrative “maintenance” tasks, policy research, and editorial projects.

You will also need to ensure your internship complies with policy and law. If your institution has a center or office for internships, consult with them on any applicable laws or institution policies on internships to ensure you comply with requirements. You may also find it helpful to contact department/program advisors and internship coordinators to see what their requirements are in case student interns wish to obtain credit for their internship with you.

Finding Your Intern

There are formal and informal ways to find your intern. We post the internship on our university jobs site and our internship center website. We let English program advisors know we are searching for an intern. We also ask professors who are teaching advanced editing classes if we could visit their classes to discuss our internship and answer questions about it. All these avenues have worked well, including posting on LinkedIn.

In addition to conducting the usual interview and requesting writing/editing samples and reference letters, we have candidates take an “open book test” with a sample policy draft and The Chicago Manual of Style. This has often been the tiebreaker between two very qualified candidates.

Making the Most of the Internship for the Student and Your Office

Each time we hire an intern, we develop a training plan and a work plan for the semester ahead. For example, for the interns who have not yet taken the advanced editing class, our senior editor conducts training based on Chicago’s section on style and usage, which is the foundation of the craft of editing and proofreading. The workplan usually includes “maintenance tasks” such as updating our Policy Manual glossary; scrubbing gendered language from the Policy Manual; or updating and tracking references to university policy, Utah system policy, state and federal law. In addition to these maintenance tasks, we assign the intern to a few editorial projects. They work alongside me or the senior editor as a sort of apprentice, attending drafting committee meetings, and editing alongside us. We review the intern’s editing and explain why some revisions work very well and why others were not correct or appropriate.

What Do Interns Leave Our Office With?

Most of our interns go on to careers in editing and writing. Some have gone on into policy work in other fields.

Amanda Cooke, recommended to us by an editing professor, says of her internship: “The internship was a wonderful start to my career! It opened up new opportunities and allowed me to explore job options in a professional setting. I definitely would not be where I am today if I had not applied. Six years later, I am still working at the same university where I was an intern, now as a full-time employee.” Amanda is now a program manager in academic administration—one of her duties is to assist with the development of academic policy.

Contributing to the University’s Educational Mission

Working with student interns helps us to contribute to our university’s educational mission. But more than this, it helps us connect our policy work with students and to help them become more engaged in our shared governance process (this is an ongoing effort). We also can come to better understand what our students are concerned about during their university experience and what they hope for after graduation.

Working with student interns has kept me hopeful about the future. The young people I have had the privilege of working with are concerned about our society, are hard-working, and are good citizens of the planet.

Working with student interns has been—well, a good policy to have.