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One-Year Internship Program on Software Engineering: Students' Perceptions and Educators' Lessons Learned

Golnoush Abaei, Mojtaba Shahin, Maria Spichkova

Abstract

The inclusion of internship courses in Software Engineering (SE) programs is essential for closing knowledge gaps and improving graduates' readiness for the software industry. Our study focuses on year-long internships at RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia), which offers in-depth industry engagement. We analysed how the course evolved over the last 10 years to incorporate students' needs and summarised the lessons learned that can be helpful for other educators supporting internship courses. Our qualitative analysis of internship data based on 91 reports during 2023-2024 identified three challenge themes the students faced, and which courses were found by students to be particularly beneficial during their internships. On this basis, we proposed recommendations for educators and companies to help interns overcome challenges and maximise their learning experience.

One-Year Internship Program on Software Engineering: Students' Perceptions and Educators' Lessons Learned

Abstract

The inclusion of internship courses in Software Engineering (SE) programs is essential for closing knowledge gaps and improving graduates' readiness for the software industry. Our study focuses on year-long internships at RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia), which offers in-depth industry engagement. We analysed how the course evolved over the last 10 years to incorporate students' needs and summarised the lessons learned that can be helpful for other educators supporting internship courses. Our qualitative analysis of internship data based on 91 reports during 2023-2024 identified three challenge themes the students faced, and which courses were found by students to be particularly beneficial during their internships. On this basis, we proposed recommendations for educators and companies to help interns overcome challenges and maximise their learning experience.
Paper Structure (22 sections, 4 figures, 4 tables)

This paper contains 22 sections, 4 figures, 4 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background and Related Work
  3. Employability Skill Development through WIL
  4. Internship Delivery Structures in WIL
  5. Methodology
  6. Institutional Context and Program Structure of the Software Engineering Degree at RMIT University
  7. RMIT SE Internship Program: Core structure
  8. Methodology for Students' Perceptions (RQ1 and RQ2)
  9. Data Collection
  10. Data Analysis
  11. Methodology for Educators' Lessons' Learned (RQ3)
  12. Data Collection
  13. Data Analysis
  14. Limitations
  15. Findings
  16. ...and 7 more sections

Figures (4)

  • Figure 1: Student enrolments in the internship course over 2014-2024 (S1 and S2 denote Semester 1 and Semester 2 respectively).
  • Figure 2: Examples of identifying key points and assigning codes to two student responses
  • Figure 3: Adjustments of the internship settings over 2015-2025
  • Figure 4: Overview of the proposed recommendations.