Forests and Trees: The Role of Academics in Legislative Internships

Abstract

The primary form of experiential education in political science is an internship in a government office. Too often, however, with little actual monitoring of their experiences, government interns become little more than classic office “gofers.” Fortunately, there are strategies to make political internships not only useful learning experiences for students but also productive ventures for the offices employing student. These strategies can be subsumed under two general rules. Rule number one, successful internships require systematic and proactive monitoring prior to, during, and immediately following the internship experience. And rule number two, political internships require a coterminous academic component that serves to provide theoretical “forests” for the empirical “trees” of the actual experience. This article elaborates on these two rules.