National Council on Public History

As a public history educator at Shippensburg University (a comprehensive, regional university which is part of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education), I have been grappling with the issue of the appropriate and ethical use of internships as an element of public history pedagogy for almost my entire professional career.  I began working at Shippensburg University in 1999, and from 2000 to 2011, I served as my department’s internship coordinator. The Shippensburg University Department of History offers both an undergraduate concentration in public history and a terminal master’s degree in Applied History.  Students in the graduate program have the option of doing an internship or writing a thesis, and students in the undergraduate concentration are required to complete a six-credit internship. Since 2011, I have served as department chair, and in that capacity I have remained deeply involved in the operation of our internship program.

Most of our students do their internships with historical institutions in Central Pennsylvania, and approximately eighty percent of all history interns receive no pay for their work. Some receive a modest stipend or free housing, but most receive no compensation. In contrast, virtually all of the internships undertaken by business students at our university are paid positions.

The challenge of unpaid internships is compounded by the reality that most of our students do not come from privileged backgrounds. A high proportion of our students work while attending school. Almost all work at least part-time, while it is not unusual for students to work full-time or to manage multiple jobs while taking classes. The large blocks of time spent at internship sites often competes directly with the time they have available to engage in paid employment.

Our department has struggled with the uncomfortable dynamics of internship placements where students paid in order to work for free.  At times, the arrangement had the unsavory appearance of students being exploited twice: once by employers who took their labor without pay, and a second time by the school that sold them credits for the work they did far from the university with an outside agency.  It led me to put a great deal of time and effort into researching the subject, and having conversations with others who ran internship programs. I remember well a conversation I had with Dr. Philip Scarpino of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis about his impressive fundraising efforts that ensured that every student intern in his program would receive a paid internship. It was a model that I hoped to emulate at Shippensburg, but I learned from the staff of my university foundation that internships were not an institutional fundraising priority. I spoke with a number of our partner institutions about ways that they could help fund our student interns, but many were struggling financially during the Great Recession and few designate funds for internships.

In 2010, I served on the National Council for Public History’s Curriculum and Training Committee, and I took the lead in researching and writing the document, “Best Practices in Public History: Public History Internships.”  While that document recommended that students be paid for internships, it also stressed that public history programs needed to be deliberate in structuring their internships as educational experiences rather than merely as off-site work.

Over the next several years, our department implemented most of the best practices recommended by that document. We successfully structured our internships so that they now have syllabi, reading and writing assignments, reflective modules, and extensive faculty involvement that makes them far more analogous to a college course than off-campus volunteer work. Providing a scaffolded learning experience has also improved the quality of the internships. While students still see the work they conduct at the off-site institutions as the core of the internships, those experiences are now embedded in the context of scholarship, reflection, and intentional learning. Students know that their goals are to gain skills, to broaden their experiences, and to build their capacity as professionals. They are also reminded that they need to be thinking explicitly how they are using the historical skills they developed as public history students at their internship site, and how their internship work enhances their skills. Our students consistently rank their internships as one of the most important elements of their college education.

Our department is also very realistic about the fact that many of our students will not work in the history field, and even those who do may find it beneficial during their professional careers to move into other lines of work. We stress for our students to think carefully about the skills they acquire during their internships, how those skills may be applied to other non-history settings, and how they can talk to future employers about the skills and experiences they gained through their internships. In these ways, internships are critical for making our students more marketable—both inside and outside the history field.

While the changes we have made to our internship program have been effective, the benefits of internships are not available to all students.  For our working students, the time commitment and lack of pay often makes an internship impossible.   Some students undertake grueling schedules that attempt to balance work, internship, classes, and other commitments. Sometimes these balancing acts work, and other times the stress takes a deep toll on students’ work, personal lives, and mental health. It is common for students to subsidize their internship by taking on additional student loan debt. Students often ask if the benefits of an internship will be worth the additional financial and personal cost, and whether or not doing an internship will be the factor that determines their ability to find work after graduation (we make no such guarantees). Our faculty members try to be as realistic as possible about the costs and benefits of doing internship, but some students inevitably decide that an internship is not worth the financial and personal sacrifice.

Our department has been placing unpaid interns with historical organization in the community for nearly forty years.  Is it too late to rethink this practice, or should we take solace in the quality of education and training our students do receive from high-quality internships? Has our willingness to allow unpaid internships devalued our students’ skills and undercut the job market for humanities professionals? Can we find a new paradigm that provides the rigorous, hands-on training of internships in a way that values our students and strengthen the job prospects for history professionals? Should we directing our students away from our traditional history partners to sites where students can employ their skills and receive better wages in non-history institutions? These issues are particularly relevant to me and my department as we are now engaged in our five year program review, and we are exploring ways to revise and improve our existing programs.

I am a strong proponent of giving our students the opportunity to use their skills and to work in a professional environment before they complete their education. In my ideal world, our students would devote more time to gaining professional work experience while taking classes. They would also get paid for their work, and ideally they would receive quality faculty mentorship without paying tuition for the opportunity to do an internship. This would allow students the time to focus on self-reflection, skills development, and professional growth with less financial strain, and it would eliminate the odd dynamic of having students paying for the opportunity to work for free. This would require significant policy changes at my institution, and it would also require the allocation of significant additional funds—changes that may be challenging in our current political and economic environment.

I look forward to our discussion, and to hearing other possible strategies for providing our students with high-quality experiential learning.

~ Steven Burg, Professor of History, Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania

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