The School of Criminal Justice internship office provides students with the skills required to be competitive in today's job market. We strive to build and maintain partnerships with criminal justice agencies in order to foster student success. This guide serves to enhance those partnerships by sharing what we have learned through working with a variety of agencies. We encourage you to incorporate these ideas into the program you provide to our students.
Should you have any questions about the internship program at the School of Criminal Justice, or wish establish an internship program at your agency, please contact Tim Homberg via email (hombergt@msu.edu) or by phone (517-432-3197), Career Development Coordinator, for more information.
Organizations should:
The internship office will:
The school is committed to providing agencies with motivated student interns. As part of this commitment, we will
MSU is a research intensive, land-grant university where people matter. At MSU, excellence is a continuing tradition. Innovative and hard working people create knowledge and actively serve communities;at home and around the world.
Organizations should establish one contact person who will receive placement requests and arrange agency interviews. This may include forwarding request(s) to individual units who then arrange the interview, but the contact person is responsible for follow-through.
Students are notified of agency selection timeline within three weeks of receipt of placement request. Agencies will initially receive the student's resume. Additional materials, such as a transcript, application, references, or a writing sample may be requested of the student by the agency. At the time of first contact, agencies should inform students of additional application requirements such as a background checks or vaccination requirements.
Notify students of acceptance or denial approximately two months before their starting date whenever possible. This is ideal in order for students to make alternate arrangements for classes, housing or other internship positions.
Agencies should provide an orientation for interns on their first day that includes:
Interns should receive pre-internship training within the first week along with on-the-job training. This should include the following:
Supervisors should meet with the intern within the first two weeks to review the student's learning objective statement. Interns are expected to grow in a number of areas in order to receive academic credit. These areas include job competencies, understanding policies and procedures, interpersonal skills, career exploration and research skills such as seeking new information and writing reports.
Interns may have very specific skills they wish to learn or they may need assistance in developing their objectives. They realize that the agency may not be able to provide them with opportunities to accomplish all their objectives. This is a good time to confirm with the intern what they will be exposed to and who they will report to about job responsibilities or scheduling.
Supervisors, both direct and functional, should provide interns with feedback regarding their performance throughout the internship. Tell interns if they do not contribute as much as they are expected. Give the intern time to correct or adjust work behavior. Interns may not realize where the boundaries lie between only doing what they are told and taking initiative.
Interns are eager to learn as much as possible and may assist the agency while learning more about the field. Quality learning experiences should include a variety of the following:
Clerical tasks should only be a small portion of the intern’s responsibilities.
The internship program provides agencies with a performance evaluation form which gets placed in the student's academic file for future reference. Agency feedback helps the internship office determine whether a student will be approved for additional internship opportunities. Employees also appreciate this information when doing reference checks. In addition to this form, interns may request a letter of recommendation when they conduct job searches.
We highly value our partnership with local, state, and federal agencies. As an internship agency, you must