Internships

Students in all Chicago Field Studies programs intern at organizations in the Chicago area for 24-32 hours per week, Monday through Thursday, for the duration of the quarter (8-9 weeks). Internships are generally uncompensated. For more information, read the remainder of this page and then see:

Students intern in many types of organizations, including:

Financial, marketing, public relations, and consulting firms
Human rights, education, research, and policy organizations
Government offices and legal firms, clinics, and research organizations.

Through their internships, CFS students learn about careers that interest them, and the internship organizations benefit from the high quality of the work that our students contribute to their organizations. CFS expects its internships to be valuable learning experiences that provide students with an in-depth understanding of the organizations and industries in which they are working. The best internships are those that offer the student a range of experiences, provide the student with the opportunity to work on projects that are both beneficial to the organization and meaningful, and involve regular contact with a supervisor who is interested in the student’s learning.

CFS internships are the centerpiece of our programs, which combine theory and practice. In addition to providing students with the opportunity to explore a field, the internships also serve as sites for research. Students learn and employ a variety of qualitative methods to study their organizations, including participant-observation, interviews, surveys, and document analysis. In class discussions and assignments, they examine their findings in light of academic theories to form disciplined understandings of their fields and the structure and culture of the workplace.