Internship RMA Linguistics

As Linguistics student you will do an internship (year 2, block 2) that takes place i) in-house, ii) at another research institution in the Netherlands, or iii) abroad. Together with the thesis, the research master internship constitutes your individual trajectory.

On this page you will find all the information you need to prepare for and successfully finalise your internship. When preparing for an internship, please get in touch with Henriette de Swart (the Linguistics internship coordinator) well in advance to check if the internship meets the requirements.

Internship objectives

The internship enables students to acquire hands-on experience with linguistics research in an ongoing project headed by a senior researcher. The aim is to practice research, academic, and communicative skills the students have been equipped with during the RMA programme, and to prepare them for carrying out their own research in the RMA thesis. Therefore, the internship follows the electives, and precedes the thesis. The internship may but need not be directly connected to the student’s thesis, by providing, for instance, a pilot experiment or preliminary data/corpus collection that will be improved and further worked out/analyzed in the thesis or a critical evaluation of theoretical background. 

Internship content

The exact activities/tasks, mode of working, schedule and expected outcomes may vary across individual internship projects, but they are all always agreed upon prior to the beginning of the internship and spelled-out in your written Internship Work Plan. To be valid, this Work Plan must be approved by your supervising lecturer and your internship supervisor at the placement.

Supervision

Students are responsible for finding their own supervising lecturer, but are strongly encouraged to consult with their programme coordinator on their choice. In all cases, besides the daily internship supervisor, the trainee must have a supervising lecturer, who is responsible for supervising your learning process, filing the results in Osiris and is affiliated with the programme.

Internship products and assessment

All internships, even those predominantly oriented towards application and valorization must have a clearly defined component of fundamental/basic research in it.  All internship projects must have two final deliverables: 

  1. Research Paper – a paper presenting the research question(s), relevance, theoretical framework, methodology, result(s), outcome(s), and conclusion(s) of the research project;
  2. Internship Report -  a short report following the internship (2 A4 pages), reflecting upon the suitability and desirability of the research environment the internship took place in, be it for theoretical, experimental, or applied work.

The reports will be assessed (pass/fail) by your supervising lecturer, who bases the final assessment on their combined content (in conjunction with a second, possibly external supervisor, when applicable). 

Internship Dashboard: previously done internships

The Internship Dashboard contains previously done internships of the (Research) Master's programmes of the Department of Languages, Literature and Communication (LLC), and as such of the RMA Linguistics. You can log in with your Solis-ID and get inspired for your own internship search. At the end of your own internship, you add your internship to the Internship Dashboard to inspire future students Linguistics. With questions you can turn to the coordinator careers orientation, Karen Schoutsen.

General HUM Step-by-step plan and forms - (Research) Master's internship

The steps below will help you prepare for your internship and show you the required documents per step. Please read these carefully together with the detailed HUM Internship manual – (Research) Master’s (pdf), which includes important information on finding an internship, internships abroad, writing the internship work plan, registering in Osiris, supervision, keeping a logbook and writing the final report and evaluation.