Exploring the Relationships between Engineering Internships and Innovation Interests and Likelihood of Accepting a Job Offer

Abstract

This research to practice full paper presents the work of an academic-industry research partnership to explore the internship experiences of summer interns at a large global engineering company. Engineering internships give students the opportunity to apply the engineering skills they have been learning to real products and can have high impact on innovation and engineering task self-efficacy. Innovation self-efficacy (ISE) and engineering task self-efficacy (ETSE) matter because these measures are an important predictor of major and career choice [1]. In contrast, innovation interests indicate an individual's interest in innovative behaviors and outcomes. This paper explores students' innovation interests, as related to their internship work assignment and supervisor interactions. Furthermore, the relationship between the internship experience and the intern's likelihood of accepting a job offer from the same company is also explored. A survey administered to product development interns (N=115) at the end of their summer 2017 internship at a large global engineering company forms the main dataset for this work.