Learning through industrial exposure

Abstract

We wanted to investigate the benefits of and attitudes towards internships and projects within an industrial setting at Lund university’s faculty of science. We intended to do this with a survey aimed at students who had done internships and interviews with staff. We had to change our target to engineering students at LTH due to almost no science students having done internships, and ended up using existing course evaluations. We found that most students think their internships were useful for the development of both their professional and general skills and that this was the primary goal of the university. We also found that a significant motivating factor for the student is that they are more likely to quickly get a job they want after their studies, which is also a benefit for the companies.