Factors Affecting the Meaningfulness of an Internship Experience for University Students

Abstract

This study aims to measure the Meaningfulness of an Internship Experience based on a scale measure of Calling and to identify the relations of the meaningfulness between an internship period, regions (domestic / overseas), details (working experience / collective training / project learning) as well as university life (studying / club activities / part-time jobs). I performed a longitudinal and quantitative analysis on the results of the questionnaires which were performed before and after the summer internships in a private liberal arts university A in a rural area. The number of the companies which offered their summer internships in the fiscal year 2017 was 186 companies and 456 students participated from the university A. The analysis target was 224 students’ data after removing some data out of the collected questionnaires due to filling in failures etc. I obtained the following 4 results by performing an analysis of variance and a multiple regression analysis: 1) The meaningfulness of the internship experience was high when the internship period was 9 days and under, rather than 10 days and over. 2) People who experienced overseas internships had a higher degree of meaningfulness of their internship experience than those who experienced domestic internships. 3) Regarding the details of internships, it revealed that working experience or collective training increased participants’ meaningfulness of their internship experience. However, project learning didn’t impact the meaningfulness of the internship experience. 4) When the meaningfulness of learning was high, the meaningfulness of the internship experience was also high.