University Internships

The curricular internship is a formative experience carried out by university students in a place affiliated with the University (institution or company). The purpose of the internship is for the students to have hand-on working experience. The internship can be compulsory or optional, according to the student’s university course; it also has to be completed in the year required by the study plan. After the internship, the students receive university credits for their course (CFU).
The internship aims at “creating moments to alternate study and work within the educational process and to facilitate a meaningful career choice after a direct experience in the field” (art. 1 D.M. 142/98). The internship can have different values for the student: guidance, to give the student work experience by exposing him or her directly to the requirements of the job; formative value, to give the student the opportunity to deepen, verify and expand what he or she has been studied during the course. For the university, the internship is the chance to verify the match between what is offered in its degrees and the students’ possible work aspirations. For the library, the internship is an advantageous opportunity to update its scientific notions with the students’ inputs. The internship is not a work relationship and it has to be the result of an agreement among the student’s interest for the subject, the Professor’s availability to identify and organize the educational activity, and the library itself.

The relationship between the University and library is formalized by a convention to which a Formative Project should be attached.
To start a curricular internship, it is necessary that the library has an active convention with the university requesting one. If there isn’t any convention between the library and the university, a new convention can be stipulated by filling in the Convention (to print in double copy and to be signed by the library as “host structure”). Once the host structure and the intern have reached an agreement, the procedure to follow is the following:

1. The student acquires the module for the formative project that will have to be filled in by the library and a professor supervising the project (academic tutor): the module will have to be filled in double copy and signed in every part;
2. at least ten days before the start of the internship, the aforementioned documents will have to be handed to the academic manager of the student’s faculty.