By Matt Kyle | Assistant News Editor
In order to receive a bachelor’s degree in professional writing and rhetoric, I needed to take PWR 4377 — the “internship class” that required students to intern while taking the class.
This class was awful. I gained nothing from taking it, and it was an absolute waste of my time and money.
Basically, the class is a way for a professor to monitor you while you work through an internship. In professional writing, that means making sure you are actually writing during the internship and getting good samples.
In the summer, this is the basic structure of the class: It is asynchronous, with two Zoom meetings with the professor — one halfway through the internship and one at the end. There are readings on topics such as how workplaces are structured and the role of writing in the workplace, and there is one quiz per week over those readings. We also had to maintain a journal on our daily activities, reflecting on how we were improving through our work.
The summer class cost $4,000 and is worth nowhere near that.
For the price tag, there wasn’t a whole lot I was gaining from taking this class, apart from knocking out the requirement for my major. The material in the readings was intended to help guide a student into their first real, professional job, but some of the material was recycled from other classes in the major — including the prerequisite for the internship class — and much of the rest of the readings was long, pretentious and not relevant to the type of work I was doing at my internship.
Due to working 40 hours a week, all the work I completed in the class was an afterthought. It’s not like it would have been useful to really put my all into; as I said before, either I already knew the material or it would have taken too long to read. I only did the work because I had to, and even then, I was putting in minimal effort.
The real place where I was learning was my internship. Professional experience, actually going out there and doing it, is the best way to learn anything. I do feel like the field journal, while tedious to complete, did have some merit in having us report and reflect on our work. It made me think a little more critically about my work, but I don’t think it was worth the cost of the class.
For the record, I don’t think majors having an internship requirement for graduation is a bad thing. Internships are a great way for students to gain experience. I believe every student regardless of major should try interning somewhere while in college. I gained a lot of experience through my internship, and I honestly might not have done one had I not had a requirement to do one to graduate.
But is this expensive class really the best way to fulfill that requirement? Why do students need to pay $4,000 for a class to check a box and receive credit? Can’t we just receive credit for the internship we work, where we actually get the experience and learn something?
Internship classes — at least the one I took — are just a way for the school to helicopter me while I work and to take my money. Come on, I paid Baylor $4,000 to work an internship. How does that make sense?
