INT 423 International Internship Study + Internship in Prague Program Spring 2018 Semester

The competition will be fierce. Every September, over 20 million students are enrolled in higher education. Come graduation, all will be searching for a limited number of jobs. Your degree and what you've learned gives you an excellent foundation for the future - but international education makes you different from the rest. Only 15% of students study abroad, however only about 5% complete an international internship. This valuable experience, combined with on-campus learning, can give you a powerful competitive edge over other graduates.

Better still, with International Internship: The Multicultural Workplace, you'll gain a good understanding of your chosen field, but you'll also develop vital business skills you'll use every day. This makes your time abroad more meaningful and gives you bona fide business qualifications.

NACE, the National Association of Colleges and Employers developed a list of 8 business competencies students need to master to make them attractive employment prospects. Certainly, these include skills in leadership; oral and written communications; critical thinking and problem solving; and professionalism and a solid work ethic. But also practical approaches to team working, collaboration and uses of digital technology. CEA's Internships Abroad program is comprised of both a practical internship field component and a reflective and theoretical seminar component that together, are purposefully designed to challenge you to learn, to engage with, and develop fluency working within a multicultural context, while also strengthening the business competencies necessary to succeed in today's workplace. Perhaps even more important, the course will cover areas vital to new graduates: job searching, how to present yourself and leveraging your global and intercultural fluency.

In short, the aim of International Internship: The Multicultural Workplace is to equip you with everything you need to get a job and have a successful career. This course is comprised of two parts:
- First, you'll be placed in a summer internship within a sector related to your professional ambitions as outlined in the placement process.
- Secondly, you will enroll in an academic seminar where you will analyze and evaluate the workplace culture and the daily working environment you experience. The course is divided into key thematic sections grouped around NACE's eight career readiness competencies which guide the course learning objectives.

During the academic seminar, you will be challenged to reflect weekly on your internship experience within the context of your host culture by comparing and contrasting your experiences abroad with that of your home culture. By creating an intentional time to reflect on your experiences in your internship, the role you have played in the evolution of your experience in your internship placement and the experiences of your peers in their internship placements, you will develop a greater awareness of:
1) Your strengths relative to the career readiness competencies and;
2) The subtleties and complexities of integrating into a cross-cultural work environment.

Finally, in addition to personal development, this course gives you a powerful interviewing asset: a story to tell employers. Not a freshman essay of, 'How I spent my semester abroad,' but rather, "This is how working abroad enriched my knowledge, these are the skills I acquired and here's how I hope they can fit in at your company."

Previous course code was BUS 349.