Meliyah Venerable/Managing Editor 

One thing that has been a constant debate among college students is whether or not an internship requirement is worth it. The time spent doing an internship and school work could be overwhelming. For some students, their internships turn out to be nothing but a coffee fetching job. 

At Missouri Valley College some majors are required to have at least two hours of internship. Every major is allowed to take internship hours that will count towards their total hours. The majors that are required to have internship hours are the majors that are hands-on and could benefit from the experience in the field. 

Community counseling, dance, mass communication, nonprofit and sociology majors are all required to have internships. 

Some students whose majors do not require an internship decided to do internships for experience and upper-level hours. 

“I work at the lab at Fitzgibbon hospital,” Biology major Brecon Antrillo explained. “I intern under the medical lab technician. I do pregnancy tests, covid tests, flu tests, urine drug tests and urine UA tests, mono tests and more. We do a bunch of tests and test if the patients are healthy or if they have something wrong with them. We can also put their blood that the phlebotomists have taken and put it in a slide and count the cells in their body.” 

On the Gallop Blog, there is an article “Why Colleges Should Make Internships a Requirement” By Brandon Busteed and Zac Auter. They say that 27% of students that graduated from 2002 to 2016 had a good job straight out of college and it took 16% of students a year or more to find a good job. 

They say that internships lead to better job opportunities. Whether it is with the company they interned for or a different company. In their research, it seems that engineering and sciences majors have had the best experience with internships leading to good jobs. 

Education majors have internships but it is a little different than most majors. Education majors have to not only observe a teacher for a period of time, eventually, they have to student teach. Students in the major usually student teach and observe at schools around the Saline County area and areas just outside of Marshall. 

Nicholas Smith is an education major who has already done his observations and is going into student teaching next semester.

“As an education major, I am extremely grateful for getting the opportunity to observe and learn from teachers currently in the field,” Smith explained. “Under their supervision, I get to learn many different things. One of them being a teacher in the public schools during a global pandemic. There is only so much I can learn from my professor. For some of them, it has been a few years since they taught in a K-12 setting. By doing observations in the schools I get to witness first-hand different skills-wise and how to use what my professors taught me in my classes.” 

After student teaching and graduation Smith is looking to find a high school music teaching job.