Product Development Internship

(FI-MSECPDI)


For your Internship Product Development, you will be working in an organization in the (in)formal science education and communication field. You will experience this work environment, carry out all kinds of relevant tasks, seek active contact with the target audience(s) and meanwhile work on one main task: developing a product for your organization / supervisor that fits the wishes of the client.

Organization of the semester

You are supposed to invest 15 ECTS of internship work spread out over an entire semester. Your internship days will mainly fall into the second part of the week. You will spend a minimum of 60% of your internship time to develop a product related to your own field of expertise for your organization. In addition, you may work on other tasks that are relevant and interesting for you / your internship organization. During the semester 10 educational sessions will be held, focused on product design and project planning. You will conclude this course with handing in a product, a product development report, and a reflection document.

Where can I fulfil my internship?

Organizing an internship / a product development task can be done with the help of the C-profile coordinator, who has an extensive network of organizations and potential product development tasks, but you can also do it yourself. To facilitate making the right choice in terms of a suitable internship / product development task, it is important to make three decisions:
 

  • Orientation of task. You may want to choose a product development task that is more education-oriented (for instance, making a lesson module for a museum type environment) or more communication-oriented (for instance, making an information folder for a patients’ organization).
  • Favourite target audience. Choose the target audience you would most like to work with, f.i. adults, school kids, young children, etc.
  • Focus of task. Decide whether you would like a task that is closely related to your own bachelor knowledge (f.i. making a masterclass in ecology or biochemistry for talented secondary education students) or whether the product can be more general, just focused on science as a whole (f.i. trying to enthuse kids for science in a festival setting). 

Please keep the following important guidelines in mind for the product development task:
 

  1. The product development task should deal with science content (preferably related to your own area of expertise).
  2. The product development task should clearly be communication / education oriented.
  3. The product development task should be targeted at making a concrete product (so not primarily working on a specific research question the organization has, like for instance a ‘target audience analysis’, aimed at finding new target audiences for a product).
  4. The planning of the practical work of the course (depending on your roster and chosen electives you will have to divide the 20 ECTS over period 1&2 or 3&4) should be workable for the internship organization.
  5. The product development task should entail a product you can work on / develop in a planned way (a personal task), allowing you enough time to do the necessary analyses for the development process first, and then, based on these analyses, you can make the product.
  6. Ideally the product should be something the organization is waiting for and which will be used after you are gone.

If you decide to look for an internship (taks) yourself, please inform the C-profile coordinator about your plans and options for product development tasks. Only in that way we can check if everything is in order and get in touch with your organization and prospective supervisor there, to get to know each other and to further arrange things.

Contact person

For more information you can contact the C-profile coordinator, Liesbeth de Bakker (e.p.h.m.debakker@uu.nl).