Students have several options to choose from when deciding on what they want to fill their development semester with. A brand new option is internship, where they spend a part of their semester working in a real business community, ether private or public sector. This is a requested offer from both students, the business sector, government and the university sector.
In close collaboration with the Departments at the Faculty, we are now developing a pilot, as an instrument to close the gap between studies and working life, and to give students insight into how they can use their expertise in real work situations.
Sought-after candidates
We take the Government’s Report No. 16 (2016-2017) to the Norwegian Parliament, Culture for Quality in Higher Education seriously and aim to be in the lead. The Report states that the students must be better prepared for their working life after they finish their education. It requires good collaboration between universities, colleges and the business sector throughout the design of the education course and as part of the education. One of the measures is internship.
Pilot in autumn 2019
In the internship course, which is the equivalent of 10 or 20 credits, the student must take part in the daily work of a business for a specified period and gain experience with different working methods and issues in the workplace. In the preparation of the pilot, we have learned from the experiences of the Faculty of Social Sciences where some of their study programs have had internship for some years. We are also collaborating with The Career Services at the University of Oslo in order to give students job search workshops and helping them during their application process.
The tasks must be varied, challenging and provide insight into what kind of competence the workplace requires. In addition, the student will learn more about the company and become more aware of the role of the employee. We set stringent requirements for learning outcomes, and are now entering into binding agreements with several companies.
The pilot starts in autumn 2019. We start up with four Bachelor programmes:
- Electronics, Informatics and Technology at the Department of Physics
- Mathematics with Informatics at the Department of Mathematics
- Physics and Astronomy at the Department of Physics
- Biosciences at the Department of Biosciences
The allocation of internship places takes place by the students applying for an internship with the business they think is most interesting, while the employers compete for the students they find best qualified. Our goal is to have students from each of the four study programs at different companies already this autumn. Through close follow-up, continuous evaluation and further development, internship will eventually become an established offer for all Bachelor programmes at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences.
If you want to follow the work you can follow our internal website (only in Norwegian) and feel free to contact the network for internship at the Faculty.