Academic-year internships

Full-time summer professional internships

Internships form the heart of our immersion into the professional worlds of journalism and science writing. Students work as staff writers for veteran editors throughout the academic year, putting their classroom training into immediate practice. They rapidly gain confidence in their abilities as reporters, and they assemble a rich portfolio of published articles. These experiences help our graduates compete nationally for full-time summer internships and, ultimately, jobs.

Part-time internships (two days each week) are required during fall and winter quarters. A third internship during spring quarter is optional, although most students do one to hone their reporting and writing skills. Students who opt out of the spring internship often submit freelance story proposals to regional and national editors.

We have agreements with editors at four daily newspapers in the Monterey Bay area. Our interns work at these newspapers as entry-level reporters, covering community news and—quite often—regional stories in science, health, environment, and technology. Each student must complete at least one newspaper internship during fall or winter quarter.

Our other internship positions span the San Francisco Bay Area at university news offices, radio and television programs, national online news services, and an aquarium research institute.

 This network of opportunities during the school year is unmatched by any other graduate program in science writing.

Here is our current list of part-time internships:

KUSP 88.9 FM 
(Santa Cruz affiliate, National Public Radio)

Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute

Monterey County Herald

Multiple Sclerosis Discovery Forum (launching fall 2011)

Nature News (Daily online news published by Nature)

Santa Cruz Sentinel

Salinas Californian



San Jose Mercury News

ScienceNOW 
(Daily online news published by Science)

SETI Institute "Big Picture Science" radio program

Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
 (SLAC Today newsletter and symmetry magazine)

Stanford University News Service

Stanford University School of Medicine Public Affairs

UC Santa Cruz news office

Wired.com

Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University

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Full-time professional summer internships

A successful internship, documented by a letter from a pleased editor, is important to a student’s early career. A full-time internship away from the Santa Cruz campus is a central part of the program. It serves as our final requirement, in lieu of a thesis.

Such internships provide students with the opportunity to practice and refine the writing techniques they have learned in class, and to develop the independence, perseverance, and interpersonal skills needed to complete substantial projects in a real-world setting. Students secure their own internships; the program director distributes postings for regional, national, and international openings. Some internships lead immediately to jobs; other students do two or more internships in the year after graduating.

Here are the outlets where our students have completed internships in the last five years:

Magazines

California (UC Berkeley alumni magazine)

Discover

Engineering & Science (Caltech magazine)

National Geographic

Nature

New Scientist (Boston)

New Scientist (San Francisco)

PharmaWeek

Popular Science

Science (Cambridge, U.K.)

Science (Washington, D.C.)

Science Illustrated

Science News

The Scientist

U.S. News & World Report

Wired

Zoogoer (U.S. National Zoo)

Newspapers

Biloxi Sun Herald

Charlotte Observer

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Cleveland Plain Dealer

Los Angeles Times

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

The Oregonian

Orlando Sentinel

Sacramento Bee

San Jose Mercury News

Santa Cruz Sentinel

Seattle Times

Online news services

Discover.com

LiveScience.com

Wired.com

Institutional news offices

American Institute of Physics

Children's Hospital Boston

Idaho National Laboratory

International Centre for Theoretical Physics (Trieste, Italy)

Joint Genome Institute (Walnut Creek, CA)

Los Alamos National Laboratory

National Institute of General Medical Sciences

Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

Stanford University School of Medicine

University of California, Berkeley

University of Kansas

Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University

Yale University School of Medicine

Institutional news offices (multimedia)

California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (San Francisco)

California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (San Francisco)

Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (Boulder, CO)

National Ecological Observatory Network (Boulder, CO)

National Science Foundation

National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (East Lansing, MI)

U.S. National Park Service (Point Reyes, CA)

Other venues

23andMe (Mountain View, CA)

American Museum of Natural History

National Public Radio

Sea Studios (Monterey, CA)

SETI Institute "Are We Alone?" radio program

WOSU-AM (Columbus, OH)

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