The Importance Of Internship Experiences

Furco (1996) also explained that internship involves allowing students to participate in service activities with the aim of offering them practical skills in other to enhance to enhance their understanding of issues that pertains to their chosen field.

Gilbert (1997) has also echoed that internship is any carefully supervised work based training in which a person has a well thought objective and ensures that it is achieved through the learning experiences

Perceptions of the internship experiences

Various definitions and theories have been given on students’ perceptions regarding internship experiences.

Green et al (2011) have emphasized that student’s internship perceptions were the perceived-values that students utilize throughout

As the main reason for undertaking an internship is to enhance the students’ work based skills and experiences, as such to improve the effectiveness of an internship program, there has been studies on internship experiences in other to ascertain how to evaluate students’ perceptions.

Hergert (2009) in his study uncovered that a quality/effective internship as mostly referred to was likely to be influenced by students’ perceived value, demographic profile and the structure of the internship.

McCaffery (1979) has also explained that students’ satisfaction in relation to their internship experience is specifically a reflection of their future professional endeavour instead of the current internship job itself.

Narayanan, Olk & Fukami (2010), stated a perceived perception of an internship program is the illustration of additional or remote results of the program.

As primary aim of an internship is to ensure that students gain much more work-related experiences, any factor with a tendency to influence students’ expectation of the internship should be

Various researches on internship outcome have revealed that students gain enormous benefits from participating in an internship.

Foremost, five major benefits of internship to students have been identified in various researches on internship. Coco, 2000, has cited these benefits as:

1) Practical application and usage of the acquired knowledge of theories and concepts from classroom.

2) Familiarity and awareness on their choice of industry. 3) Period to identify interests and aspirations.

4) Decreasing the unawareness in the field.

5) Ability to adopt and accustom to situations which students believes it the possible to achieve during internship. students acquire significant hands-on experience (Mounce et al., 2004).. It gives students opportunity to develop specific job skills that are barely available during the studies in the institutions (programmes) (Garavan and Murphy, 2001).

The work environment serves as a platform for student to get accustom to the notion of professionalism. Thus moving from student to become professional (Tovey, 2001).

Cook et al. (2004) have also cited that internship leads to better