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Evaluations On Internships at Ball State was a study on internships was conducted January 2015 till May 2015 by senior students Erin Lewis, Melanie Upchurch, Tracy Key, Sarah Weldon, and Jamia Williams. They were psychology majors attending Ball State University and wanted to get an evaluation on how internships have increased the knowledge and expertise of students. There is a low awareness of the internship program and internship opportunities in the Psychological Science Department compared with similar departments at Ball State.

Studies
The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the importance and effectiveness internships have on Psychology majors. By incorporating in different majors, the study will calculate different results causing more arguments to our hypothesis. Internships serve as a value to students for their profession, but we fear some students rent getting what they signed up for. Surveys will give us the feed back we need to understand how well the internships here at Ball State improve the knowledge our students already have. The outlook for psychologists is increasing as more individuals continue to turn to psychologists to help manage and solve problems, particularly clinical and counseling psychology Occupation Handbook. By putting themselves in a professional setting, students have opportunities to network and gain experience (Hoy, 2011). In 2011, students indicated that there was a lack of confidence in the psychology internship resources to enable creation and maintenance of an internship program (Gosman, 2011). There are very few descriptive and evaluative studies done on the subject of undergraduate internship programs (Satariano & Rogers, 1979). The Psychology Department at Ball State wishes to increase the number of students completing an internship (Ball State University Psychological Science Department, 2012).Employers complain that employees are not well versed in real life situations, interpersonal skills, as well as critical thinking skills (Ball State University Psychological Science Department, 2012). Researchers for this project went to the Career Fair and asked employers what they were looking for regarding internships and experience. Employers and recruiters stated they would rather see an internship on a resume than research experience (Ball State Career Fair). Students reported highest satisfaction of the internship experience if they believe the work they are doing impacts the organization they intern for, having an informal mentor, and get to complete challenging tasks (Wan, Yang, Chen

Methods
Participants Participants (n = 70) consisted of Ball State University Students. Participants were primarily 18 years or older (n = 69), students under 18 years of age (n=1) with 29% of participants being Psychology Majors followed by: Journalism (13%), Criminal Justice (5.8%), Communication Studies (4.3%), Sociology (2.9%), and Other (44.9%). Qualtrics online survey software, computer, Gmail, random number generator were used for the formation of surveys.

Procedure
Participants were recruited through the Ball State University Communication Center. Participants voluntarily completed the survey if they filled the requirement of being in one of the following majors for a full semester or more at Ball State University: psychological science, criminal justice, communication, journalism, or sociology; and at least 18 years of age, and gave their informed consent. Researchers created a Gmail account, psysc492group@gmail.com, for participants to email if they were interested in being entered in drawing for incentive. A 26 question survey was created through Qualtrics, an online software program available to the researchers. Survey questions were grouped in 3 different sections, demographics, questions concerning finding internship information in their department, and questions for students who had already completed an internship. These questions aimed to find satisfaction of the internship experience, where internships were found, and evaluation from supervisors. An incentive of $10 Wal-Mart gift-card was awarded to a participant who was randomly selected by a random number generator The duration of the survey on average was between 1 to 5 minutes.

Results
The first hypothesis that there is low awareness of internships was disproved, with 77.20% of respondents indicating they knew where to find an internship site concerning their particular major. 73.70% of Psychology Majors (n=19) knew where to find internships. Other majors had a 82.35% (n=17) that knew where to find internships in their selected departments. Participants answered where they learned about internships (n=37), they indicated Professors = (32.43%), Other Sources (21.62%), Advisors (16.22%), Classmates (13.51%), Kim Taylor (10.81%), and Have Not Heard of Internships (5.41%). 46.20% of participants completed their internships during their Senior year, 30.80% of participants completed an internship during Junior Year, 23.10% completed an internship during Freshman Year, and no participants reported completing an internship Sophomore Year.

Discussion
There were a few limitations to this study. The number of participants was too few to be generalized to the population. Furthermore, there is not enough research that has been done on the subject of Undergraduate Internship programs. For Ball State University, the next logical step for further research would be to research a variety of other programs. Moreover, they should look into the different types of internship programs (such as alternate, parallel, independent, etc.). Lastly, they should implement a Blackboard Community available to Psychology students with internship opportunities/descriptions and resources to begin to test the effectiveness of an online community. The results of this study suggest that students want to be able to participate in a large variety of internships. However, they feel hindered by lack of information (i.e internship descriptions). The Psychology Department could also benefit from creating a better website and having professors give more information to students. Students would like changes to be made to the Psychology department immediately to increase participation of internships. Creating a community available to all psychological science students at Ball State University containing internship information and resources, will increase awareness of internship opportunities. Creating a community available to all psychological science students at Ball State University containing internship information and resources, will increase the number of internship opportunities available to Ball State Students. By allowing students to look through potential internship sites through the Blackboard community or look for their own (to later be approved by Ball State), we believe the satisfaction of the internship program experience will also increase. Create a survey form on Qualtrics for students to fill in potential internship site information to get approved by internship advisor if they would like to find their own. Possible steps included in a successful internship program: Prerequisite classes for students wishing to complete an internship, interviewing students who wish to complete an internship, and placing them. This extensive process create competition and eliminates students who are not committed to the internship program. If the internship program becomes too much for one faculty member to handle, it could be helpful to have one faculty member in charge of outside agency communication and interviewing students, and another faculty member to track the progress of the students.