The Internship Experience and Clarification of Career Choice

The use of internships in educating sociology majors has increased in recent years so that currently most departments offer some type of internship opportunity. Most programs are on a small scale, offering three or four hours of course credit. Although a major justification of internship programs is that they help students in career choice clarification, there has been little hard evidence that small-scale programs achieve this end. Using qualitative and quantitative data to evaluate a small-scale internship program, this research found that it helped students significantly in clarifying career choices, by providing information on occupations, reducing indecisiveness and anxiety regarding choice, and increasing confidence in the ability to choose.