Keeping an Internship Journal

1. Get ready: As you prepare for your internship this summer, prepare yourself as well for the
major project of the internship journal. As you gather your clothes and brush up on your French,
collect also the basic materials you will need to keep an internship journal. These basic
materials are :
a. A bound notebook or a loose-leaf notebook filled with 80 to 100 sheets of paper, handy
in size and professional in appearance;
b. A reliable and professional-looking writing instrument—usually a pen. (Get refills now
and keep them with the other materials you’ll be taking with you.) or c. A laptop with a new
battery.

2. Plan ahead: Try to envision your workday: include the getting-to-work time and the getting
home time; and decide in advance when you will be able to sit down for one hour—in one
sitting or in several sittings-- during the day to record what you did that day, what your think
about what you did, and what you want to do in the future. Try to plan in advance what the time
you will write will be, so that you can keep some consistency in your journal work. This makes
it easier to sit down regularly to write. Think as well of a time at the end of each week when you
will be able to sit down to review the entire week and to reflect on what goals you have
accomplished, what expectations have been met and what have not, and to state personal goals
for the remaining weeks to come.
3. Set goals and outline your expectations: Before your internship begins, write the first entries in
your journal: What are my goals during this internship? What do I expect to learn? How do I
expect to use my skills? How do I expect this internship will use what I have learned in my
studies?
4. During your internship, write in your journal regularly; Expectations for this are described in
“On-the-Job Writing” below.
5. During the last week of your internship, or the day after your internship ends, sum up your
experiences and lay out the plans for your Internship Report. Expectations are described below
in “3. At the end of your internship.”

6. Turn your journal in to your academic advisor—NOT your internship supervisor—as soon as
you return to campus in the fall. Turn in the original, not a corrected version. Turn in the
complete journal, not parts of it.

7. Your advisor will be assigning a grade to your journal by the end of the first week of classes:
it’s 25% of your grade for your internship. If you have followed the advice in 1-6 above and in the
guidelines below, you should be able to see all the effort you put in writing for more than eight
week pay off in a good return to your grade.

Good luck on your internship and on keeping your journal!

ON-THE-JOB WRITING: Expectations and guidelines

The purposes of the journal are for you to keep a record of your experiences, to recall what you have
done over a short period of time each week during the internship, and to reflect over the entire
internship on what the overall experience has been—all of this in the service of your writing a
detailed report in the fall for the culminating seminar of your program.

When to write:
1. Record regularly. You are expected to write detailed entries daily of what your work has been,
with whom, about what, accomplishing what tasks, and to make observations of the workplace
as well.
 2. Review regularly. You should sit down once a week to review the preceding week and project
for the week(s) to come.
3. Reflect. Also allow yourself half a day near the very end of the internship to review the
whole internship and write about what you feel has been accomplished, what you have learned,
and what you would do differently next time, given the chance. Take the time, just as the
internship ends and before you leave the internship psychologically, to address all these
questions on paper fully and with an interest to bringing full closure to the experience you have
just had. If you do so, you will find that you have captured your internship on paper in a way
that you will not be able to do as well once you are back at AUI and more and more time
separates you from the summer you have just spent in internship.

What to write about:

1. Daily
o What you have done today: What tasks? Describe each. What conversations, meetings,
seminars—with description of each.
o Comments on what you did today: was it what you expected? What did you think of it?
o What you have seen, what you have heard—formal or informal observations.
o Information: take notes as if in a class while a meeting or event is in progress; then you can
comment at the end of the day.

2. Weekly
Read back over your notes for the week. Write in response to these questions:
o What have I learned this week?
o How have I used my skills?
o How has what I have done this week been related to what I have studied?
o Are things going as I had expected, how so? How not so? (Some weeks, you may say,
“I’ll have to wait until later to see.”)
o What would I like to change about how I work next week? How can I do so?
o What would I like to continue doing that seems effective?
o Am I meeting my goals for this internship? Which ones? Which ones not? (If not, what can I
do differently to help meet these goals?)
o As the weeks go on: were my impressions of how things are the same now as they were in
the first weeks of the internship? If so, how? If not, how not?

At the end of the internship:

• Take a hard look at all the weeks and days. Reflect on what you have learned about yourself,
about the organization, about your field: write about what you learned.

• Look back over the weeks and days and ask yourself what you accomplished.

• Look back and write about the organization: describe it again, and write as much as you can
remember about where you worked: from memory, not just from your previous entries—
although taking a good look over them again may fill in some gasp for you-- and definitely
NOT from the organization’s promotional material or descriptions of the organization written
by others. At the same time, if you remember anything that you know you did read
somewhere, go back and find it, and cite your source! Overall, try to use only your own head
as the source of information about the organization: after all you just worked there for six
weeks!

• Write about: Which of the goals that I set in the pre-internship entries do I think I met?
In what ways? Which have I not met? Why do I think so?

• Write about: if I had it to do again, this is what I would do differently. Why?

• Write about: if I had it to do again, this is what I would do the same. Why?