College of Agriculture (California State Polytechnic University Pomona)

Report to your job and follow instructions just as any other employee. The agency is paying your salary and you are completely responsible for giving them your best job performance.

Purchase a dated record book with lined pages and use a full page for each date. At the end of each working day, write a short essay in it recording what you did that day. Tell your impressions of the methods used, any suggestions you would make to improve procedures, any problems encountered or observed and any outstanding or novel results. Be specific and complete. Write it in such a manner that it is readable and understandable by a third party at a later date. Do it each day; do not neglect it and try to record several days at once.

Give one evaluation form and a stamped envelope to your direct supervisor on each of the dates listed and ask that person to mail it to Cal Poly. If you have had more than one supervisor during the reporting period, give a form to each one (omit any supervisor who supervised you less than 20 hours during the reporting period).

Work hard. Do more than your share. Volunteer for extra duties which would give you valuable experience or impress your superiors with your attitude. Always arrive on time and be willing to work late. Be tactful; do not attempt to impress others with your education. Carefully make suggestions when you know they will be well received; however, do not be a "know it all."

Attend all meetings which will help familiarize you with the employer’s operations. Park interns majors should attend all the park board meetings. Attend at least one city council meeting and any others when there is an important park issue on the agenda. Attend at least one staff meeting. Attend all important recreation program events. Attend any other events or meetings which will provide good experience for you. If they occur during working hours, ask your supervisor for permission to attend and make up the work at some other time. Horticulture majors should attend sales, management, stockholders, or other meetings held. Golf course students should attend greens committee meetings and superintendents meetings.

Your grade for HOR 461 will be based in part on the average grades of the evaluation reports mailed by your supervisors. It is your responsibility to see that these are mailed to Cal Poly (preferably within one week of the due date). If they are not received, a "D" grade for the missing period will be assigned. Your daily record book will be graded and averaged with the reports of the supervisor’s. It will have the same weight as two bi-weekly reports.

Your grade for HOR 462 will be based on a report you write about your internship. It must be written in the style specified by the Senior Project manual.

You should write a brief draft of the report, then correct and revise it and type a double-spaced draft. Submit the draft to the Senior Project Director, who will assign you an advisor for critiquing. You should anticipate considerable revisions and additions because a Senior Project paper must be perfect in regard to form, grammar, punctuation, and spelling before it will be accepted. It must be of high quality and substantive with regard to content. It is not another freshman composition theme; it must be comparable to a report which an executive would submit to his/her board of directors, city council, or to a federal government agency. It is the faculty advisor’s responsibility to review the successive drafts and point out shortcomings; it is the student’s responsibility to rewrite the report until the required level of quality is reached.

Internship papers are generally 20-30 pages in length plus an appendix; however, they may be shorter if well written. Unless the faculty advisor specifies a different outline, the report should follow this form (golf course students should follow the golf course outline):

CHAPTER I – INTRODUCTION

Explain that the paper is a report on an internship and tell what an internship is in language which a reader would understand two years later, knowing nothing about you, Cal Poly, the curriculum, or the agency for which you worked. Give the purpose, scope, procedure, importance and situation of the internship. Close with a paragraph stating how the remainder of the paper is organized, i.e., what is in each chapter. Be complete but concise. Chapter I should never require more than three pages. Write in present or past tense, not future tense; remember it will be read after the other chapters are completed.

CHAPTER II – ORGANIZATION AND SERVICES OF THE AGENCY OR COMPANY

Describe the agency’s history, budget, equipment, facilities, products, problems, services provided, procedures, personnel and their organizational structure. If they are part of a city or county, briefly describe the community the agency serves. This should be the longest chapter of the report and it must be logically organized with appropriate subtitles.

CHAPTER III – INTERNSHIP WORK EXPERIENCES

Write a condensation of the summer’s work taken from your daily record book. Do not try to tell what you did hour by hour or day by day. Summarize your experience and organize it by logical category, assignments to different locations, assignments to certain crews, or by weeks, for example.

CHAPTER IV – EVALUATION OF THE INTERNSHIP

Tell what you learned and what you should have learned but did not, and why. Tell what should be done to improve the internship experience for anyone else who goes to the same agency. This chapter is where you are free to give your opinions. Be objective in the other chapters and tell what you observed and what was obvious, not what you think about people or methods. Evaluate the internship arrangements, not your employer’s methods of operation.

APPENDIX

Include a collection of forms, manuals, brochures, ordinances, and all written materials used in the operation of the agency or company. Include everything to which you refer in the text, and anything which would be helpful to any reader in understanding the operation of the agency. Remember to collect three copies of all written materials during the summer so you do not have to make photocopies.

The first draft should be written during the last month of work and must submitted to the Senior Project Director at the first meeting of HOR 461. If the first draft is not turned in on time, the grade for HOR 461 is automatically limited to a "C", at best, regardless of grades submitted by the supervisors.

Interns must register for both HOR 461 and HOR 462 for the first quarter immediately following the internship. The final original and two approved copies must be submitted for grading before finals week. If the final copy is not ready by this time, an "F" grade will be given, and the student must re-register for HOR 462 for the following quarter. A "SP" (satisfactory progress) grade will be given only in the event the failure to complete on time was due, in the opinion of the faculty advisor, to a cause beyond the student’s control, such as illness, or death of an immediate family member. Procrastination, the failure to gather sufficient information during the internship, or poor drafts which require lengthy rewriting are not justifications for a "SP". If an internship report is not finished by the end of the next quarter another "F" will be given and approval of the internship for a senior project will terminate. The student will have to begin his/her senior project over with a new topic.

The daily record book should be submitted to the Senior Project Director with the first draft on the first day of classes.

If there are photographs, they should be put in the chapters where they are mentioned. If they are not mentioned specifically, they may be included in the appendix.

Chapter II and/or Chapter III may be presented as a slide program if the intern whishes. In this case, the chapter's should be replaced by a script which indicates when slides are to be changed and which slide goes with each part of the narration. Slides should be presented in one labeled carousel tray (80 or 140) in a labeled box. A recorded soundtrack should be made on a cassette with either audible or magnetic signals to change slides.

The Senior Project Director will serve as the internship coordinator. This person is listed in the class schedule book as the instructor for HOR 461 or HOR 462. Evaluations from employers are to be mailed to the department office and given to the Director. The Director will calculate the HOR 461 grade from the evaluations and daily journal and submit them to the Records Office at the end of the quarter.

The Senior Project Director will assign an advisor and give the draft to that faculty member. The student advisor will read the draft and advise the student what revisions are needed before it is submitted for grading. When it is ready, the advisor will give the three final copies to the Director to be assigned to two other faculty members for reading and grading. The HOR 462 grade will be the average grades given by the advisor and the two graders.

All interns must have a signed Internship Application filed with the department secretary before the work begins. The form contains a statement indicating the student is aware of all the requirements.