learning | Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog

Hard to find a job, but not an internship

The bullish market for interns is good news for those in college, who find that internships are increasingly required for landing that first job. The summer posts allow students to bolster their resumes, learn more about their field of choice and meet executives who could hire them for full-time positions one day. And they often pay a good wage: on average, $16.33 an hour, or $7,850 over 12 weeks, Luckenbaugh said.

“Students are looking for internships even after their first year,” said Sheila Curran, executive director of Duke University’s career center, noting that 88% of Duke students graduate with at least one internship under their belts. “It’s become expected that you’d have at least one internship during college.”
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Universities are also recognizing the increased importance of internships and are working harder to secure spots for their students, said Richard Bottner, founder of Intern Bridge, a college recruiting research and consulting firm. Some colleges are even requiring students to do at least one internship to graduate.

graphic of Deming Scholars internship cycle

The Deming Scholars MBA program at Fordham includes a heavy dose of internships [broken link removed] (“Subject matter is delivered in five integrated learning cycles. Five eight-week sessions of classroom lectures, seminars and study are linked by seven-week internships at participating firms”). Integrating well planned internships can be very valuable to improving learning. By the way if your company would like to host these students you can contact the program to discuss the opportunity.

Curiouscat.com has a web site for locating internships. I would love to get some good management improvement based internships added – there is no charge to add internships. For actual jobs try the Curious Cat Management Improvement job board.

The Power of Prediction by Jared Spool:

By asking these questions up front, we give the team members something to focus on. When a participant gets stuck somewhere they predicted, it stands out. They can take pleasure in knowing they identified a potential landmine.

In our experience, it stands out even more when the participant gets stuck someplace nobody expected. These opportunities allow us a chance to learn something new about how users approach our designs.

Great idea. As I discussed in, Management is Prediction:

The critical issue is making the prediction, then comparing the results to that prediction and then figuring out how your original understanding can be improved based on the new data.

Personally I have found the act of actually making predictions and examining the results incredibly helpful in improving the speed and depth of my learning. You can also learn tendencies for missed predictions (predicting greater improvement, prediction faster adoption of new idea, underestimate additional costs required by new procedures…) and then adjust to make better predictions over time.

Tag Archives: learning

Internships Increasing

Predicting Improves Learning