Political Science Internships

Yes. Students can get up to 6 credits for internships during their time at Drake. Receiving academic credit requires supplementing your internship experience with directed reading and writing assignments or reports under the supervision of a faculty member. Generally, an internship experience for 3 hours of academic credit will require that you work at least 10 hours per week. To receive credit, you must be a sophomore, junior, or senior who has completed 15 credit hours of POLS classes and maintained a 3.0 GPA in all POLS classes.

To start the process, you will want to identify a faculty member who will supervise your internship credits, someone with expertise or research and teaching interests that align with the internship placement. Remember that all professors can exercise discretion in determining whether they will supervise an internship. This ensures that they have adequate time to work with you throughout the semester.

• In conversation with that faculty member, you will need to develop a list of reading and writing assignments that will be completed as a part of the internship class.
• Once you have established the learning goals and assignments for your academic experience, you will need to complete the Arts and Sciences request form to officially sign up for the internship. This form will need approval from the faculty member supervising your internship, your academic advisor, and the department chair.
• Once those permissions have been given and the request has been processed, the credits will appear on your DUSIS schedule as POLS 193 (for the Fall semester) or POLS 194 (for the Spring semester).
• If you are doing a summer internship, you will want to speak with the faculty member supervising your internship credit to discuss the process for receiving credit during the summer.

Internships are valuable whether you receive academic credit or not. The Political Science department allows students to receive up to 6 credits for internships during their time at Drake. Since many students will complete more than 2 internships, you may determine that the extra work required to receive academic credit is something that you’re not interested in pursuing, but that doesn’t mean that the internship isn’t valuable — it will still be an important step in developing professional experience and building your professional reputation.