Virtual Internships in Health and Human Services: Practices and Strategies for Planning During the Pandemic

Abstract

The pandemic has had a significant impact on the work of many family and consumer sciences (FCS) professionals and those in related fields across the world, including college student interns. Across disciplines, it is well established that quality internships can help students enhance their professional development, networking, and multicultural skills; internships also can enhance university–community partnerships (Horney et al., 2016; Simons et al., 2012). Yet, during the pandemic, many students who had secured internships, including in essential work fields, found themselves struggling to secure sites. At the same time, many students needed the internship to graduate on time; thus, we knew we needed to create an internship pandemic plan. FCS is an applied science (AAFCS, n.d.), therefore many of us have been trained to think creatively about how to relay research-based information to community audiences. Similarly, it is in our backgrounds to create opportunities for university–community partnerships and to train students to do the same. In this paper, we focus on the ways the pandemic pushed us to come together as applied scientists and educators to create virtual internships and train students to be applied scientists.