INTERNSHIP OFFER AND STUDENT CHOICES - DO THEY MATCH?

Project and internship courses are typical in professional study programmes and are particularly relevant to engineering studies enabling students to apply in practice knowledge and technical skills acquired during the studies. Besides special professional skills, it is important to develop such soft skills as a team work skills, communication skills, innovation skills etc. There is also a strong trend for internationalization of education and increase of learning mobility including international internships and international project teams.

Erasmus Network project PRAXIS aimed to support these trends and create the European Centre for Project/Internship Excellence. The portal http://www.praxisnetwork.eu/ has been developed. In the portal companies and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) can upload their offer and students can find a project and/or internship course matching their needs at the best. Students can also present their wishes and look for the best offer from the companies.

A questionnaire was developed within the project as a form to collect information from HEIs and companies on projects/internships they propose, and students were asked to present their wishes on what kind of project/internship format they would like to participate in the most. Around 70 responses were collected from HEIs and the companies, as well as 1,800 responses from the students. All this forms the database which is used to develop the portal. This database also contains valuable information on how the Project/Internship offer matches with the student choices.

In this paper are presented results of the analysis of the data collected via questionnaires. There will be also presented experiences of the Riga Technical University in developing University – Industry collaboration to support student internships.

The results of statistical and qualitative analysis revealed that in many aspects project/internship offer and student choices match, but there are also gaps. The project/internship course implementation models presented in the questionnaires give an overall picture of model solutions, as well as some examples of good practice to follow.