Internships

Internships form the heart of our immersion into the professional world of 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; some students opt to pitch freelance stories to regional and national editors.

We have agreements with editors at daily and weekly newspapers, university news offices, radio stations, and research institutes in the region.

 Several national news services also work with our students remotely. Nearly all of these opportunities are unique to the UCSC program.

School-year internships, 2022-23 (part-time)

California Sea Grant

Good Times (Community weekly newspaper in Santa Cruz)

KQED Radio, Science Desk

KSQD Radio (Community radio station in Santa Cruz)

Lookout Local Santa Cruz (community news)

Monterey County Herald

NASA Ames Research Center (social media internship)

Nature news team

Santa Cruz Sentinel

San Jose Mercury News

Science 
(Daily online news)

Seymour Marine Discovery Center

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Stanford University News Service

Symmetry

Full-time professional summer internships

A successful summer internship launches a student’s early career. A full-time internship away from the Santa Cruz campus is our final requirement, in lieu of a thesis.

At such internships, students practice and refine the writing techniques they have learned in class. They develop the independence, perseverance, and interpersonal skills needed to complete substantial projects in real-world settings. 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.

The UC Santa Cruz program supports only paid internships and has long advocated for higher salaries for interns.

Here are the outlets where our students have completed full-time internships in the last decade:

Broadcast/Multimedia

KQED radio (Fresno)

KQED radio (San Francisco)

National Public Radio

PBS NewsHour

Texas Public Radio

Magazines

Chemical & Engineering News

Conservation

Discover

EARTH Magazine

National Geographic

Nature

Nature Medicine

New Scientist (Boston)

New Scientist (San Francisco)

Popular Science

Quanta

Science (Cambridge, U.K.)

Science (Washington, D.C.)

Science News

Scientific American

Scientific American MIND

The Scientist

WIRED

Newspapers

Biloxi Sun Herald

Boston Globe

Charlotte Observer

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Cleveland Plain Dealer

High Country News

Los Angeles Times

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

Minneapolis Star Tribune

The Oregonian

Orlando Sentinel

Report for America Fellowships

Sacramento Bee

San Jose Mercury News

Seattle Times

STAT (Boston Globe biomedical news)

Online news

Discover

Grist (Seattle)

Inside Science News Service

LiveScience

Multiple Sclerosis Discovery Forum

Retraction Watch

WIRED

Institutional news offices

American Geophysical Union

American Institute of Physics

Children's Hospital Boston

Fermilab

Idaho National Laboratory

International Centre for Theoretical Physics (Trieste, Italy)

Joint Genome Institute (Walnut Creek, CA)

Los Alamos National Laboratory

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

National Cancer Institute

National Institute of General Medical Sciences

Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (Japan)

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Princeton University Office of Research

Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

Stanford University School of Medicine

UC Berkeley

UC San Francisco

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)

U.S. National Park Service (Washington, DC)

Other venues

American Museum of Natural History

California Academy of Sciences

The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting

San Francisco Exploratorium

SETI Institute "Big Picture Science" radio program

Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History