Graduate Internship/Externship Experiences in NIBIB Funded Graduate Training Programs

Experiential learning opportunities such as internships and externships are an important part of graduate education for many engineering students. Short-term off-campus training experiences can help students see the 'real-world' impact of engineering research and broaden their understanding of their career opportunities. Arguably, internship and externship experiences are particularly valuable for students in interdisciplinary majors, such as biomedical engineering, which cross more traditional fields and career paths. Thus, interdisciplinary graduate training programs, such as those funded by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), sometimes include an internship or externship component as a way to ensure breadth in the educational program. The purpose of this study is to review the graduate summer internship/externship practices of NIBIB funded graduate training programs (i.e., T32 mechanism). Our review is based on a survey of the principal investigators (program directors) of graduate training programs (T32 sites) currently funded by NIBIB. By comparing internship/externship practices across training programs, we hope to enable training program directors to reduce redundancy in developing policies and procedures for internships/externships, improve this experience for graduate trainees, and provide a baseline for internal continuous improvement purposes. For example, the survey results show that most programs have settled on a similar duration for the off-campus training experience (about 6 to 9 weeks), but there is more variation as to when during the trainee’s education they participate in the internship/externship (summer after 1st year, 2nd year, etc.). Other factors reviewed include: (a) overall goals for the internship/externship; (b) type of internship/externship host institution (e.g., company, government lab, academic medical center); (c) source of housing and travel financial support for the internship/externship; (d) policies for ownership of intellectual property generated during the internship/externship; and (e) assessment methods used to evaluate the effectiveness of the internship/externship.