 Okay, we might get started. Hello, my name is Dr. Stephen Kidd, and I'm the coordinator for the Faculty of Sciences Internship Program. So this is an information session on internships and what they involve for 2020, for the summer of 2020 and for 2021. Okay, excellent. Nothing's moving. What's happened here? Wow, this is good. Okay, so what I plan to do through this session is to give you an overview of what exactly we mean when we're talking about internships in the Faculty of Sciences. So what are or what is the Sciences Internships Program? Why you should choose to do it and how it works. And importantly, this is for the limited scope of projects that we have for summer, but there are projects available for the summer. But also really importantly, for semester one, 2021, there's going to be a lot of opportunities for internships and work placements. So what is this exactly involved and how do you get involved in this? Okay, you know, there's nuances around what we mean when we talk about an internship for Sciences as opposed to something that you might do if you're a vet or if you're a nurse or an accountant. Okay, so I'm going to go through some details exactly why we have an internship for science students and what this exactly means. For the Faculty of Sciences, about 18 months ago we established a course, or we actually established two courses. So there's a second year course, Science 2700 and a third year course 3700. And these are three unit courses. You can obviously take as a second year or third year course. And the workload is equivalent to a normal three unit course. There's work that's involved, but there's also time that you spend within a host organization. I've actually very specifically put there an external host organization. So what we try to establish for you are projects that are outside the university. They're not research projects within labs at the university. They're something that you'll do with an external host organization. But on top of that experience that you get, there's also learning activities. So there's a course. There's a framework that goes around the work time that you spend with an external host. There's learning activities, there's assessment tasks and there's also obviously the internship itself. So those things set up the course. Okay, so why do a internship? And I think this is open to first, second and third year students. So if you just bear with me, put your hand up if you're a first year student. Excellent, that's wonderful. So as a first year student, there's all sorts of reasons why you leave school and choose to come to university to do a science degree. Some students will have a very clear idea of what they're interested in. Some students do science because they're just interested in science. And during that process of your science, hopefully during your first year and then in your second year, sorry, my laser pointer seems to run out of, this is by doing all my lectures by Zoom. I haven't needed to use it for a while. I should have changed the batteries this morning. I apologize for that. I'll try and use the mouse here. But now we're all going. This isn't working, is it? There we go. So during your first year, you'll come in contact with a lot of concepts and ideas around science that you may not have previously known. You may have come to university with a really clear idea what you wanted out of your science degree and who you wanted to be at the end as a young professional or a scientist. And that idea might change. You might have come with no idea of what you wanted from your science degree. And hopefully during the process of first year and second year, it starts to crystallize in your mind what it is about science that you really love. And hopefully by third year, what we've done is we've built a huge amount of discipline knowledge. You're starting to do your majors and you're really excited. And you'll come out as a graduate with a really deep understanding of the science around a specific discipline. And you'll have a major and quite a lot of students end up with a double major. And that's great. And as you can see, that girl there, she's done a double major. So she's got two things and she's running around. She's got a big smile on her face. So that's great. And when you finish, there's no other way that you would get more knowledge than your degree. So we will provide you with all the scientific knowledge around the majors and prepare you to be a research scientist, a scientist in industry, or a scientist as a young professional working somewhere. You're not going to get more knowledge around the science or the discipline than from what we provide for you in the activities, the learning activities and the courses that you do in your program. Okay? So what's really important as that girl with her major who's now graduated, she's going to need a whole lot of graduate skills. And there's clearly the discipline knowledge. If she's done chemistry, it's all that chemistry that she now understands that she can take that with her. And that's wonderful. But along the way, as a graduate, she will need other skills. Okay? And that might be analytical skills, that's problem solving, it's being able to report her findings either orally or in a written context. It's working within a group and it's time management. So she needs these other skills or personal attributes. And you know, the really interesting thing is you do get those through the learning activities that we provide in our courses and our programs. You know, through your practice, your shoots and other learning and assessment tasks that we give you, we are aiming to provide these other skills and attributes so that you come out with those as part of the graduate skills. But also as a young professional, either specifically as a scientist or otherwise, there are other things that you will need, other personal attributes that go beyond simply knowledge that we're providing here at the university. And these are things that sometimes are referred to as soft skills or transferable skills. And these are increasingly important for working in a dynamic and flexible environment. These are things such as interpersonal skills. People often talk about emotional intelligence, so social and personal awareness, adaptability. I think 2020, if I'm right, correct me if I'm wrong, has been quite a dynamic workplace for many places and required their workforce to be able to change and work in different environments and with different people. As part of these attributes as a young professional, you need resilience, you need to manage and work with people at the same level as you, but also work with people higher up with leadership groups. And you also need to work across disciplines and form networks, okay? And I've put here that as a young professional, and this is whether you're working specifically as a scientist, this is regardless of what you do as a graduate, you'll need these skills that go beyond knowledge, okay? And this is a table that was presented at the work, at the World Economic Forum, comparing what employers were asking from their new employees from 2015 to 2020. And I'm not gonna go through all these, although there's a lot to discuss in this, but there are some things there, these are the list of their top 10. There's some things there that are consistent and they're always gonna be there. And then there are some things that have been introduced in 2020 and beyond. And I should point out that this was put, this was in 2019, so this was before COVID and all sorts of other things that have hit workplaces globally, but there are things there that people need, something, point six there, emotional intelligence is something that is increasingly important. And as a new graduate, as a young professional, whether you're working specifically as a scientist or research scientist, a scientist in industry or for government, or if you're working in and around science, the discipline knowledge that you want will still be very important, but that portion of your job is probably becoming less and less. It used to be maybe when I was about your age, 80% of what a new graduate would be doing would be just doing what they learned in their third year. The science is developing so quickly that in third year, the discipline knowledge that we give you is gonna be advanced in two or three years' time, okay? So employers now are looking for more skills or attributes in their new employees to ensure that they're able to cope with a dynamic and changing field of science or their ability to work with other disciplines as well. So all these things are really important. So the ones that I've ticked there are critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and the really important one that I've kind of touched on in the last 38 seconds is cognitive flexibility, okay? So once again, let me highlight that the attributes that you really need around analytical skills, problem-solving, group work, and time management, we can do that, and we try and do that as much as possible with some of the things that we introduce in our programs and courses. We can do that here at the university through learning, yeah? And that's, you know, it can be all sorts of things that you do within your courses in Prax, in Chutes, and otherwise, but also through career services and indeed within our science courses, the internships courses, we can give you modules and tasks to do that help you build up your personal and professional profile, to teach you how to best put together a CV or a resume, so we can do all that here. One thing that we can't do is give you the experience in a workplace, you know, when you're challenged with working with difficult managers or new tasks that you don't know how to deal with and new people as well, okay? So there's two things that are really important here. There's the learning, and then there's the actual experience and how you reflect on that experience, and that's actually really essential to our science internships program. It's not, and hopefully I can say this as many times as possible, it's not the discipline knowledge. You're not gonna get any new discipline knowledge or information about your major and the scientific knowledge by going out into a workplace, we can do all that here, but it's the experience of working in a workplace with other people, with managers, with teams, managing time and reporting and all those sorts of things. So it's those transferable skills that are central to the sciences internships program, okay? So because of that, the projects that we find, some of them are discipline specific, but some of them are quite broad, and they're in and around science, they might be in science communication, science policy, they might be in intellectual property and researching new discoveries or patents and things like this, and once again, some of them are very specific in terms of their discipline. So the workplace experiences is in industry, business, or government bodies, it's in science, some of them are discipline specific, but they're in and around science and I wanna emphasize that. So what exactly are they? I've just mentioned all that. They're not a job placement, it's not accreditation. In and around the university, the term internship means different things. If I'm in accounting, I wanna do an internship so I get my foot in the door, and they get to know me and they'll employ me. If I'm up at the vet school, I need to do a certain number of hours of delivering calves or whatever they do up there to get my accreditation, okay? So those are different aspects of work placements or internships. What we're looking for is to provide you guys with experience in a workplace, in industry, like I say, so that you can build on, you can have an experience that helps build on those transferable skills, and you can reflect back on those and see how that's changed your perspective of workplaces and working. And indeed, whether going and working in industry, government, or in a hospital, or something like that is what you wanna do, or maybe it might make you think, oh, look, my personal attributes are more geared towards focusing on a research project and I might continue down that path. Okay, so the eligibility is for faculty of science students, they're for all students, so Bachelor of Science or Bachelor of Science named degree students. What we've said is that you need to have completed 36 units of credits, so this is students who are about halfway through their second year or third year students, and we've put a cut off as GPA of 4.2, but we're all really kind and generous people, and if you don't fit into this for whatever reason in terms of your timing or other things, we do have some flexibility, so you can see me as the course coordinator and we can talk about your study plan and what best would work for you, okay? So what does it involve, I've mentioned this previously, it's equivalent to a third year, a three unit course, not third year, a three unit course, so it's approximately 120 hours within a host company, which is about two days per week for 10 weeks, okay? And this I'll emphasize again is arrange the negotiator directly with a mentor that you have within the host company. Industry, government and companies don't work by semester based systems, you know? So sometimes we need to negotiate with them the times that best suit them and you. The internship program is open and is offered for semester one, semester two, but also through winter and summer, so we can kind of be very flexible with when you do the actual internship and when that sits within your program as well. The placement is not lab based, it's not meant to be a research placement, it's in and around science, some of them are discipline specific, but it's meant to be an actual job as a young professional or a graduate. Once again, this is in business, communication and engagement, so there's meetings, there's reports, there's some of the projects, some of the placements are actually projects, so you'll be working within teams for a specific achievement, you know, an outcome, and something that you're given on your own to do. Yep, so that's really, really good. So there's a process for this, so how does this work? How do, if you're interested, how do you go about getting into science internships? There's an information session, which is just now, this will be recorded. If you have further questions after this, you can directly communicate with me and I will answer your questions, so my name's obviously Dr. Stephen Kidd. But how do you find a place? And really importantly, we've got some super help in how we engage and build up these projects and scopes by Ross Forbes, who sits centrally at the university and I might just ask Ross to introduce himself and give a couple of minutes overview on the process of applying for an placement. Thanks Stephen, there you go. Thanks Stephen, and can I firstly say congratulations to each of you, simply for being here, for recognizing this as an opportunity that's worthy of consideration. And it probably does reflect, you know, thinking outside the square a little bit from your mainstream topics and things. So, you know, well done for recognizing that and hopefully we can provide you with some opportunities that are worth pursuing. So, look, my role in the university is as an internships coordinator. I've got a particular focus on supporting the faculty of sciences, which hasn't really got quite the tradition of internships that perhaps other areas of the university have got. So, the basic process is there are two ways of achieving an internship through our processes at the moment. The general scheme is that I'm always out there talking to industry and government about opportunities that might exist. I'm promoting this scheme out in the real world and looking for opportunities where hosts are willing to consider taking a student for this period of a 20 day placement or about the equivalent of a 20 day placement. We get some really enthusiastic hosts and certainly we get some repeat offenders as well who have taken the opportunity to trial this as a sort of one off and have found it so successful and so helpful to their organization that they want to come back and have more and more. So, we've got a range of hosts, some new, some who have had internships previously. When I'm talking to a host in that way, I then ask them to define a project that would suit a 20 day placement and we get a project outline or a scope as we call it defined. Stephen takes responsibility for reviewing that from an academic point of view to determine if it meets the learning objectives and most often they do. If they don't, we go back and talk to the host about just massaging that and tweaking it so that it's a project that will serve both the needs of the host, but also the university and you as a student who's trying to take on this task. So, most of our opportunities are developed in that way and again, once I've got an opportunity like that, I will now post that through Career Hub and I'm guessing most of you, if not all of you, are quite familiar with Career Hub. Let us know if that's not the case because we sort of consider that that's probably the standard that you are aware of that. I'll post this as almost a little job advertisement, but labelled as an internship. Career Hub accommodates a whole range of opportunities and I'm sure it's a bit overwhelming when you go in there and look at those, but if you search under opportunities, I'll try and regularly use a standard naming format for those opportunities that I'm involved with. They will be titled Sciences Internships, followed by host organization name and project title. So, for example, just yesterday I posted one, so this is a real live opportunity that any of you could apply for now and it's labelled Sciences Internship, City of Holdfast Bay, Holdfast Bay Environment Assistant. That posting will be up only till the 4th of November, so it's open for about a week and a half. Your responsibility is to keep checking Career Hub regularly. We don't post these all on the one day. As soon as I've got one available and ready to go, I'll post it up on Career Hub, so it's on a rolling basis you'll see these opportunities. Limited time, these hosts want to know what student interest there is. They want to get on with recruiting and choosing, selecting the appropriate student. So, advertise through Career Hub, keep an eye out for them labelled as Science Internships. As I said, on a rolling basis. The other way you can achieve and organise a placement is what we refer to as self-sourced. If you happen to be firstly confident enough to approach an industry or government organisation, have contacts in there, have some discussions with them to say, you know, I'm an undergraduate science student at the University of Adelaide, would you be willing to provide an opportunity for me to do an internship with you? We have some students who are confident enough to do that, they're confident enough to have contacts already or are willing to make a few cold contacts. If you come to me and say, here's this organisation that seems very open to an internship for me, then I can follow that up and speak to those contacts and progress that on your behalf. There is some advantage to that, albeit you've done some of the hard yards initially, but more importantly, you're not then going to compete for that opportunity. If you arrange a self-sourced internship opportunity and it meets our academic requirements and the host is appropriate, we do some checks, we've got some due diligence checks that we need to do, we're not going to send you to a remote place where there's no satisfactory supervision or anything, but if we're confident that it meets our needs, then we'll just set that up on your behalf and you can go straight into that internship, rather than those that are advertised through Career Hub, you will be competing with your peers who also apply for that opportunity. So two ways into the scheme, look at the advertisements that we will put up through Career Hub on a rolling basis. The application process is quite simple. It requires a cover letter, specific to that position. Please don't use a common cover letter template. Make sure you refer to the particular opportunity that you're applying for, a brief resume, and there's just a couple of little video questions that you need to respond to. So on the basis of that, we'll assess those applications, we'll shortlist, we'll provide the host with a shortlist and they'll probably then contact you for usually a reasonably informal talk over the phone, zoom meeting, maybe catch up over coffee and they'll then select their final candidate for that opportunity. So that's my role. Keep an eye on Career Hub. Here's the real take-home message and look for opportunities that you're interested in. You are eligible to apply for more than one position if you want to. Please be aware, we expect you to be reasonably responsible about that. If you apply for several and we shortlist you for one and the host offers that to you, we would expect that you are serious enough and genuine enough to want to take that. Forget about the other ones you've applied for, even if one of those was perhaps a favourite. We would expect you to just move ahead and take the first one that's offered to you. Otherwise the process gets really difficult to manage across many, many students. That's probably all I need to offer at the moment. So please feel free to contact me at any time through internships in the university on Career Hub. Thanks, Stephen. Excellent. That was brilliant. I think that covered everything hopefully and there'll be time at the end if people have specific questions about the process, but I think that covered everything that we needed to cover there. The last thing I wanted to touch on was the assessment. I mentioned that the internships sits within a course. There are learning activities and clearly there's assessment as well. So quite often students are really interested in assessment. I find in the last few years. So I'm just going to take you through the assessment and why we've set up these particular assessments. With any experience, whether that's an internship or a prac or anything that you do, the value that you really get out of it isn't just to pass through that experience but to reflect on it, to think back as to the elements of that experience that have had an impact on you personally. So just really briefly, before I get into the assessments, that's what we want you to do. We want you to think about who you think you are at the moment, who you want to be as a graduate. So there's kind of a reflection before the internship. There's thinking about what you're doing during the internship, both the activities that you do, physically what you are actually doing, but also reflecting on the transferable skills, those other things that you're being challenged by by being in a workplace, so you keep a little diary, and then at the end you do a report where you look back on who you were before the internship, the activities that you did during the internship and what you've learned during that internship and how that's impacted on you personally and your personal and professional attributes and what that might mean in terms of how you now see yourself as a graduate. So that's a final report. So that was my overview of the assessment. The assessment also includes a fourth item. There's pre-internship, internship diary and a report, but also the hosts give us a little bit of an assessment of you as well. So in detail, so what we've got is Task 1 which is working through some modules which are on the My Uni course. One thing I wanted to, and that reminds me, so we go through the process of identifying a project, interviewing with a host and being accepted for a workplace to do internships, and that all happens through Ross and myself talking and you're looking on Career Hub. You don't get enrolled in the course until you've been accepted by your host and you don't enroll in the course, the Faculty of Sciences enrolls you, I'll just make that point, but once you're enrolled, you'll clearly be able to see the My Uni course on Canvas and there are modules that are there and you work through those. There are professionalism, building your personal and professional profile, CV and things like that, and employability, and then after that you put together a little document and that document forms your Task 1. That should be submitted before you start your internship. As Ross indicated, these internship opportunities are when a host comes to us with a project and they're on a rolling basis. An internship doesn't start week 1, or semester 1, and finish in week 10 ready for week 12 and it doesn't work like that. So there's not a due date per se. Some students might start in week 4 or 5, some students might start before semester because that's when the project opened up. So hopefully your project starts, you get enrolled, you get signed up and you get enrolled, you see the My Uni course, you do the modules and then you start your internship and you submit your task before you actually start your workplace. During your work placement you can do some diary entries and that forms Task 2. This is in two parts, as I've suggested, talking about the activities that you're doing, the challenges, the things that you're learning, but also identifying the transferable skills that you are building during those activities. So probably once a week you'll do a diary entry. Now I say probably once a week, as students and academics we're used to things being really structured, some of these internships will be really compressed. It might be over the mid-semester break, you do full-time, so it won't be once a week in that case, it might be every few days and you can talk to me about how best to do that. So as you can hear, there's a lot of flexibility on how we're designing the course and the activities that you're doing. This gets submitted as a single document of all your diary entries on completion of your work placement. And then the third task is like a reflective journal or a report. And like I've suggested, a little while ago, a minute or so ago, this is sort of looking back at what you did during your internship and putting that together in a report, and importantly, reflective journals are sort of looking at before you did that specific experience. Who were you? What were your personal and professional attributes? What did you think about yourself as a graduate and your career going forward to five years' time? That's what you were before the experience and the things that happened on the experience, how they've impacted on you personally. My Unig course has information on reflective writing, which is really, really valuable. Not just for this course, I might add, but it is really valuable. Okay, so I think I've said all the things here. The reflective journal is identifying the activities, how they've impacted on you, the things that you've learned, the skills that you've developed, then looking back at how you consider your career pathway now having had an internship. It's a reflection on the process, the whole process. I've given plenty of time. It's four weeks after completion of your internship. It's about 1,500 to 2,000 words is what we're looking for there. Okay, so that's the assessment. I think that's everything. I was going to open up the rest of the time to questions, if people had questions, either for me or for Ross. Yes. Okay, so if you're doing and it depends, so if you're doing a major, that's 12 units at level three. If you're doing a double major, that's another 12 units, so that fills up your study plan. And we can talk personally, I don't want to talk about everyone's individual study plans, and this has been recorded, so you're probably not best. But in third year, that doesn't leave you any space. Double major, 12 plus 12 is 24, that's a year. There are other options. We could look back at your second year and you can shuffle round things that are already there. Or you can do an internship that doesn't sit within the course. There are opportunities that pop up now and again. They're not through this pathway. They're not for credit. But there might be opportunities and they would be out of semester. But there are things. We can talk more about that if you want to. Did you want to add something to that, Ross? No? Okay. It is a little bit unfortunate. So in chemistry, a lot of third year courses have identified that six units is a lot. But if you're keen on a double major, then that kind of blocks out the third year. Yep, that's true. Any other questions? Yes. So it's just where the course sits in adding to your study plan, your transcript. Yep. So the courses themselves are exactly the same. Indeed, we have had and it's not ideal, we have had students or a couple of students who have done it in second year and wanted to do another one. So we've kind of changed the third year course in terms of considerations. But ultimately, the second year and third year course are exactly the same. Those courses are the same. Yes. Are there any other questions? Yes? For your course. Now, there's a couple of things in what you said there. So what you do is you look on Korea Hub and there's a description there. Now, it might be with Adelaide Brighton for an analytical chemist and a lot of it's going to be doing you're doing chemistry? So you're not doing chemistry. So you think, hmm, probably not best for me, that one. Then there might be one that's on science, it might be with Adelaide Enterprise on communication or looking at patents and that would be for anyone. So that's a discipline non-specific sort of thing. So there will be discipline-specific internships, not many but once again I'll emphasize I think I've probably said it 104 times but for again the idea isn't to go into don't look and say I'm doing biomedical science I'm really interested in microbiology which is great but I wasn't going to stop but don't just look for microbiology ones or biomedical science you'll see that a lot of internships are very broad so you look broadly and you'll see internships the projects will be described in detail and if you've got questions about them it's probably best to you can contact Ross he can talk about other things around that description but the exact project and what you will be needed to do in that workplace will be itemized in detail the project and you'll think that suits what I'm looking for I'm really interested in science communication they're talking about doing this, this and this and setting up this, that sounds really interesting I just wanted to make the comment COVID has affected the response from some of our hosts early in the year we had many hosts who came to us and said we're really sorry we just can't accommodate this now in our workplace most of their workforce were heading out to work from home things like that the reality is COVID has impacted on some of the opportunities we expected to have and still probably is having a bit of an effect so it will become competitive if you're interested in following up an internship in your future don't be discouraged if you're not successful with the first one you apply for that's the reality of life and it's like applying for jobs and things it doesn't mean you're worthless and not to be considered it just means you weren't selected for that particular one so please don't be discouraged we may have limited numbers of opportunities in this summer semester semester one round consider semester two as well look further out things will change things will improve and we're hoping they'll improve quite quickly but I just wanted to mention don't be discouraged if the first one you apply for you're not successful with there's a number of other people chasing them now so just stick out and talk to us we're happy to offer advice about how you might improve your application career services are very helpful with advice about developing resumes interview techniques, things like that take advantage of all of those opportunities because all of this is building on trying to increase your employability at the end of your undergraduate studies whether you choose to take a research path and honours and PhDs or things or try and jump into the workforce your employability is what we're really trying to focus on in much of this program so good luck with that talk to us any time please that's a really interesting question I think we wanted to keep those separate so that's managed by Sharon Sharon Scott and I think early discussions the simple answer is no so if you're doing it and you're getting credit if you're doing it as a course you're going to go to your Adelaide Graduate Award if I could just if I could just add to something that Ross touched on there one of the stunning things experiences that I've had is how students get into a workplace and really sort of change their perspective we had one student I remember Jack last year 2019 he was a microbiologist as most kind of intelligent sensible people sorry and he wanted something that was really disciplined and specific and we had something in science communication it was animate your science they're a local company that does spectacular things around animation and putting out stories for science communication and he came and saw me actually and he said I don't want to do this this sounds really dull I want to do something in science and I said well this is the opportunity I didn't say it like that and he had the best time he did it in semester 2 and he ended up working through the summer he learned lots of things he communicated with me afterwards and I was still in touch with Jack it was a wonderful experience so you'd be surprised you don't know what you don't know I haven't had any student some have thought that it wasn't going to be a great experience but all the students have had wonderful experience with the workplace that they've ended up in we did actually invite a couple of students to come and speak I've actually overlooked that shown as not in the audience is she by any chance I actually haven't met her face to face I'm just wondering if our venue change might have mucked that up so I'm very sorry about that but I can only reiterate what Stephen said you know some of the experiences our students have are quite exceptional Oz Minerals one of our mineral geosciences students has recently done one with Oz Minerals and has been invited back to do a paid internship now we won't support that in the same organisation for credit he's got this wonderful opportunity to get a paid opportunity there and I'd be very surprised if that doesn't lead to perhaps future work opportunities so great opportunities through this program if you can fit it in and if you're interested okay so are there any other final questions no excellent so once again thank you for coming along like Ross said congratulations for identifying this it's something that you can add to your usual curriculum and the courses that you're doing within your programs I really believe and am passionate about employability being an essential part of our graduates in 2020 and beyond so well done coming along and keep your eye on Career Hub and if something catches your eye and you're not too sure about it you can contact Ross if there are other questions after this you can contact me directly remember my name is Stephen Kidd microbiology okay thank you very much okay that was good no I think that was excellent thank you