For More Effective Summer Internship- Make Experiential learning Exposure is a Prerequisite

Summer internship for MBA students is a standard practice of Business Schools across the globe. Some institutes take internship seriously and some don't. Generally, the trainees are assigned to an in--house executive of the company where the student will do the internship. A faculty from the institute is also assigned to each student as a mentor. In the majority of the cases, the engagement of the faculty mentor is limited. and the in-house mentor is also too busy to spend time with the mentee. The whole process is a self-learning exercise. The summer internship is for two months. Students generally get the assignment after a week. The nature of the projects vary case to case- it may be a transactional job like selling of Credit Card to organizing promotional events. Of course, some gets quite interesting assignments as well. As a result, the take away from summer projects vary widely. Experience suggests irrespective of the nature of the project students get a very narrow exposure instead of a holistic knowledge about business principles. With no supervised learning, most of the cases students are not able to fully utilize the opportunity from the summer internship.

From an academic point of view, the objective of the summer internship is to apply the skills that a student has acquired in the classroom in the practical field in a specific area. Over and above mastering a particular concept, it also aims for a higher-order objective of increasing proficiency in specific business discipline, improve business skills in communication, reasoning, and working in teams in real life environment.

To get the benefit of an internship, a student must know how to learn from observation and from doing things by oneself. This is possible if one gets exposure to Experiential learning. The experiential learning is widely used, in theory at least, by many B'schools for a few topics in some of the courses. During a course students of B'schools are so busy, it is almost impractical to go out of the campus and spend time on practical experience. Leave alone the problem of getting the opportunity to step into a company. I am doubtful to what extent this format of applying experiential learning serves its purpose.

The term experiential learning is relatively new but the essence is not new- Confucius quote summarises the principle: " I hear and I forget,. I see and I remember. I do and I understand". In 1984 David Kolb coined the term Experiential Learning (ELT) and it is based on the premise that a person learning from direct experience of doing things and observing others while doing. In the parlance of research methodology, we may call experiential learning is somewhat similar to Autoethnography.

Kolb has introduced a four-step process: Concrete experience, Reflective observation, Abstract conceptualization and Active experimentation. Concrete experience comes from practically doing things. Reflective observation involves reflecting on the experience to review the situation and find the meaning behind the experience. The most critical part is the Abstract conceptualization. The objective is to develop theories to explain their experience so that the concepts can be applied in a new situation in the future. Lack of reflection will not make the knowledge and skill replicable and it is of limited use. The last stage- Active experimentation is to apply the experience in another new situation. It validates the gained knowledge out of the previous experience. The summer internship is the only scope a student gets to use experiential learning and without proper application of experiential learning, the learning is not complete. Even, according to David Walsh, clinical assistant professor at the University of Houston department of health and human performance, a semester-long internship program is not long enough for experiential learning. He is of the view that students should be prepared on how to learn from experiential learning and structured support throughout the internship, will create more meaningful experiences for students.

Therefore, instead of making a few topics for experiential learning in each course, it is better students should be trained before internship on Experiential learning method through a structured programme. Maybe it is a need of the mentors as well.