Volume 7
Volume 7, Number 33 |
April 23, 2009 |
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Cynthia J. Martincic
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Abstract: Providing students in software development courses with opportunities to apply the course concepts within the time constraints of the traditional semester presents many, diverse well-documented challenges. Selecting a project for the students to work on is one of these challenges. Solutions to this challenge have included “toy” projects for which the instructor is the client, or “service learning” projects for which an outside organization is the client. A rather unique opportunity was presented to the students in the Computing and Information Science Department at Saint Vincent College, a small liberal arts college in southwestern Pennsylvania. An Information Technology solutions company offered to provide a small computer lab in which students could work as interns for the company on-campus and coordinate their work with existing courses. Although this collaboration presented many challenges of its own, the internships have been incorporated into the department’s curriculum as course projects for the systems analysis and design, software engineering and senior capstone courses. The collaboration has been immensely beneficial in providing students with industry experience in all aspects of software development during their college years.
Keywords: software engineering course projects, systems analysis and design course projects, capstone projects, industry collaboration, student internships
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Recommended Citation: Martincic (2009). Combining Real-World Internships With Software Development Courses. Information Systems Education Journal, 7 (33). http://isedj.org/7/33/. ISSN: 1545-679X. (A preliminary version appears in The Proceedings of ISECON 2007: §1544. ISSN: 1542-7382.)