Internship Policies

REFLECTIVE JOURNAL

The main purpose of the Journal is to demonstrate reflective thinking. How did this practical experience compare to your theoretical knowledge? Which units of study and which skills you gained from these units, did you draw on, when undertaking your Internship.

The Learning Objectives of the internship are that you should:

• Reflect on your experiences in the workplace internship in a critical (analytic and evaluative) manner.
• Develop a practical understanding of the context of media work and reflect critically on the place of media in society.
• Appreciate and learn to deal with the tensions that may arise from the differences between media theory and professional media practice.

The purpose of the Reflective Journal is to accomplish the Learning Objectives and:

• Reinforce your learning
• Assist you to plan, allocate and manage your time
• Collect resources to assist you with your research project.

Writing the Reflective Journal:

Please clearly identify at the beginning of your journal

1. the name of the organisation (ie Fairfax)
2. the type of media business ( ie PR, Print magazine etc)
3. your title or role (ie researcher)
4. the time frame (ie January - March)

Briefly describe each new activity you are assigned or attempt - comment on each experience in relation to your expectations based on your studies. You can use notes, diagrams, or any other means of describing and explaining what you did. If you are assigned a job that you do over the period of the internship, note and reflect on your progress.
You must refer to your units of study when outlining your tasks - DO NOT simply list tasks or make daily notes about routines.

• Consider in the case of each activity what you did or did not learn. That is, document your positive and negative experiences. What factors aided or inhibited your learning? (This may overlap with the next dot point). Who helped or hindered you and in what ways?
• Relate you experiences in the workplace to your media studies. You should do this in relation to both theoretical and practical aspects of your course. For example, you might consider how a particular approach to media theory (such as semiotics or feminism) translates into practice. You should evaluate the usefulness (or not) of practical production skills you studied, such as: writing a news story, script or media release; production planning; capturing and/or editing audio or video. What about the experience of group work? Did that ‘translate’ in the workplace?
• Build your observations and reflections into a set of ideas for your research project.
• Be 2000 words in length. You may organise your journal as best suits your material. This may be chronological, thematic, by task, by project or any other way that helps you present your experiences within the word limit.

Note: If your internship is split over several placements, you should include all of them in your journal; even if one only lasted 5 days, you will have some useful observations and experiences to share.

The Reflective Journal is to be submitted via the Internship WEB CT two weeks after your last or 20th day of your Internship placement.