Imagine earning credits for your master’s degree at your favorite place to visit – whether it’s online, in your hometown, or in another part of the world. Students in the Florida State University master’s program at School of Library & Information Studies (SLIS) are taking advantage of internships to gain credits, as well as learning experience, while exploring new worlds. 

Here are some examples:

•  SLIS master’s student Kelly Robinson is in her third semester of an internship as the supervising librarian for FSU’s Florence Study Center in Italy. She has been learning on-the-job about Web 2.0 technologies, cataloguing, book processing, and book repair.
• Mitch Winterman, a distance student in New York City, is interning at MTV Networks in Manhattan. Mitch is learning how to use a digital encoding station, screen the content of videos for quality control, and to employ MTV’s digital asset tracking system.
• Maria Jimenez is doing an internship in the Foreign Languages Department of the Miami-Dade Public Library System, assisting the public by translating documents from English into Spanish and vice-versa and learning about the department’s collection and daily operations.  
• Valerie McCurdy is interning with the Mary Brogan Museum of Art and Science in Tallahassee. “It’s a great way to implement my interest in working with kids into my pursuit of a Museum Studies certification,” she said.
• In his internship, Chris OBrion is using his journalism design and cartooning background to help fill a void left in the Community Relations Department of the County of Henrico Public Library (Henrico, Virginia) when it lost its graphic artist to budget cuts. He is learning about outreach, production, and the administrative aspects of public relations.
• Terri Johnson was able to free up time to intern in her local community at the Wakulla County Public Library (Wakulla County, Florida). “I had been volunteering there and I discovered that I loved working in a small rural library,” she said. “We worked out an internship to evaluate, weed out and develop their adult nonfiction collection.” Not only is Terri learning to apply collection development to a rural library, but she is making a valuable contribution to the organization.
• Juan Prado is living in England while serving the information technology needs of the FSU London Study Center’s library. He hopes to have a career as a web developer/engineer or as an information architect.
• Distance student Christi King is interning at Parnell Memorial Library in Montevallo, Alabama, where she is working with children in the summer reading program. She is learning how to plan children’s programming and storytelling in a rural area with limited resources.

Internships are elective courses that can be chosen from those available through SLIS, those developed by students independently, or those developed with the help of the SLIS internship coordinator. Organizations are often happy to have the help of an intern who has a genuine interested in learning about their environment and internships can sometimes evolve into full-time jobs.

Up to six hours of the 36 hour master’s program may be completed as internships. Graduate students are being creative in developing library and information studies internships that focus on their interests, whether in a reference desk of an online library, in a local museum, or in a foreign country.

The School of Library & Information Studies at FSU’s College of Communication & Information offers a highly-ranked and cost-effective master’s program, accredited by the American Library Association. To learn more about the program in library and information studies, visit http://slis.cci.fsu.edu/.