Being Internship Supervisor: Thinking About Changing Things

One of the things that I often forget when I am accepting interns to work with me is that the system that we have in place offers lots of flexibility. I have the ability to adapt and change my program in ways that I have never thought of. In the past years, I have had interns who worked four days a week, interns who have worked three days a week with me and started their own programs the other two days per week. I can do part-time internships, full-time internships, hybrid live and video production internships. I can do it all as long as the intern and the academic advisor agree with the plan. If I want to offer three, two-month long internship placements, I can.

The 1020 hour, six-month internship was started way back when music therapy was in its infancy. It is a relic that we have continued based on tradition and convenience.

Now, I know that finding housing for seven months (how much my internship lasts) is extremely inconvenient, but could you imagine having to find housing for two months in three different places? Anyway, we have that flexibility, but we don't often use it in the music therapy world.

I am currently thinking about how to change up my internship program. There are only two National Roster Internships in my state. We used to have nine, but now there are two. I cannot accommodate all the local students who need places to volunteer out here. I cannot be the only person who is feeling this way. I wonder if changing my model to something else would help birth new National Roster programs. I wonder if students would be interested in a two month rotation or a three month rotation. I am also wondering if I can insist on work during our breaks. If I could do that, then I could collapse the amount of time that interns have to stay with me into six months rather than the seven. The only problem with that specific accommodation is that I then have to work as internship director during my breaks from work. That would be complicated since I already do not get paid to be an internship supervisor, and I need my breaks from working. It is something to consider, though.

Lately, I am noticing that most of my interns are looking towards private practices when they leave their educational process. I am not a private practice person, but it seems that there may be some room for learning about these things from others. I wonder what I could do to help my interns with their pathways into their futures from within my internship program.

I am approaching this like I approach all things - in a competency-based model.

To be truly competency-based, I have to start with what I want interns to be able to do at the end of their internships. I have to then figure out how these outcomes can be reached by my interns. Here's where my history with task analyses comes in handy. I can parse out various tasks and goals for interns to accomplish at different parts of their internships. 

To sum up, I am wondering what I can do to help interns in their future endeavors in a way that will decrease how much time they have to stay in the local area. I want to think so far away from the box in this one that you can only see the box as a small smudge in the distance.

Why not? As an internship director, I have some flexibility to design the experience the way I want to design the experience. I just need buy-in from the intern and his/her/their academic director. Oh, and I need to learn all these things as well.

There are so many options available to us all, but we often fall into patterns because "this is the way we do things." That has never been a good excuse, but it is certainly easy to fall into. There is nothing out there that states that my interns have to only work at my facility during their internships. There is also nothing out there that tells me what assignments interns have to do. I wonder if there could be some benefit to making things different in the time interns have with me.

Time to start thinking about these things. Happy Monday, all.

(Now that I'm thinking about this, my word of the year makes sense here as well! Bonus graphic!!)