Donna D. Huddleston Instructor Coordinator Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice

As a faculty member of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, I wear two hats: one is the Undergraduate Advising Coordinator wherein I am responsible for advising all CJUS majors and minors in academic and career planning, and the other is teaching CJUS courses, including the Undergraduate Internship Coordinator responsibilities for CJUS 4150, our Internship course.  In this role it is my pleasure to place our majors in local, state and federal agencies related to the criminal justice field. 

These internships allow students to clarify their career options, identify and strengthen their career-related skills, and provide invaluable opportunities for students to relate their academic and theoretical knowledge to job-related professional skills and experiences.  Our department was honored to have one of our majors accepted into the prestigious Washington D.C. Internship Program this past spring, and we are honored to have a second major accepted for a spring 2009 placement.     

I have found that internships offer students invaluable networking opportunities and potential employment opportunities, as well as functioning as impressive additions to their resumes.  Although many of our majors have general work experience, for most students these internships represent their first step into their professional careers, and afford students the chance to participate in the �real world�, not just theoretical class discussions or unrealistic TV representations of the CJUS field. 

Internships are positive experiences, so positive, in fact, that some of our interns have continued at their assigned agencies in a volunteer capacity until they have completed their degrees. Others have overwhelmingly expressed that they wish they could have completed an internship earlier in their academic career.  For this reason, our department is discussing the future possibility of implementing short-term shadowing opportunities or �mini-internships� for students during their freshman or sophomore years.  This will assist our majors in expanding their practical knowledge of the CJUS field, and exploring their career options.