Internships

Many programs ask students to serve a supervised placement before they graduate — a worship internship in a local church, a chaplaincy term in a hospital, a pastoral residency. An internship is part job (an organization posts it and accepts students), part project (it has deliverables, a faculty advisor, and a final evaluation), and part graduation requirement (it must be finished, with hours logged, to count toward the degree). The Internships module captures all three in one place: partner organizations post positions, eligible students apply, the seminary tracks placements, hours, and requirements, and completion flows straight into the Graduation Requirements audit.

Overview

An internship moves through a short, predictable life:

Internship Type        (define once: hours, tracking, template, advisors)
        │  organization posts
Internship Position    (a slot, with a weekly commitment and schedule)
        │  eligible student applies
Internship Application (one per student per position; gated by a requirement)
        │  accepted (auto or after review)
Internship Placement   (the site, supervisor, dates — one or more)
        │  the term is served
Hours + Requirements   (logged and signed off)
        │  completed
Graduation Requirement (turns green on the student's audit)

Everything is configured from Desk. A seminary that does not run internships simply never creates a type, and nothing changes elsewhere.

Internship types

An Internship Type (Desk → Internship Type) describes a kind of internship a student can pursue — Worship, Chaplaincy, Pastoral — and is reused across many positions and students. You set it up once. It carries:

• Default hours required — the hours a student must log to finish, unless a program overrides it. Required hours are really a program concern, so a program's graduation requirement can set its own Internship Hours Required (Program Graduation Requirement → the internship requirement row). That lets a single type (e.g. Worship) require 300 hours in one program and 150 in another, without cloning the type. The type's value is the fallback when a program doesn't set one.
• Hours tracking — how those hours count (see Logging hours).
• Allow multi-site / Max sites — whether a student may split the internship across more than one placement, and how many.
• Backing course (optional) — when set, the internship is also a real course enrollment, so it carries the course's credits, grade, and fees, and its grade flows to the transcript. Leave blank for a non-credit internship.
• Evaluation model — Inherited from Course (when a backing course is set, the course's grading scale applies), or, without a course, Pass/Fail or Graded recorded by the faculty advisor.
• Graduation Requirement Item — the graduation requirement this internship fulfils. This is what gates eligibility and lets completion turn the student's audit green (see Applications).

Requirement templates

A type's deliverables are defined by Internship Requirement Template rows (Desk → Internship Requirement Template, one per deliverable, linked to the type). Each template declares:

• Scope — Application (one copy per application, e.g. a learning covenant) or Placement (one copy per site, e.g. a final site evaluation).
• Due date rule — an anchor (Application Date, Placement Start/End, Previous Requirement, Expected Graduation, Term Start) plus an offset, so due dates are computed automatically for each student.
• Three party sets — for the student, the seminary, and the partner organization, independently: whether that party submits, what they submit (an attachment, text, a link, or just an acknowledgement), the label and instructions they see, and whether that party signs the requirement complete.
• Submission form template (optional) — a blank form (e.g. an evaluation PDF) the party downloads, fills, and re-uploads.

When a student is accepted, the type's templates are snapshotted into live requirements with their due dates filled in.

Faculty assignment

Turn on Auto-Assign Faculty and the type draws advisors from an Academic Unit's Internship Advisor pool (see Academic Units & Faculty). Set the Advisor Pool Unit on the type, or leave it blank to use the backing course's unit — one of the two is required when auto-assign is on. The advisors themselves are the unit members wired with the Internship Advisor capability, each carrying a Max Students cap on their membership.

When an application is accepted, the advisor with the most remaining capacity is assigned automatically (round-robin); entering an advisor by hand always wins, and a withdrawal frees the slot again.

The older per-type advisor-slot table is retired — advisor pools now live on the Academic Unit, so a professor's capacity is maintained in one place across every internship type they advise.

Positions

An Internship Position (Desk → Internship Position) is a slot a partner organization offers for a given type. Besides the title and description it carries:

• Acceptance mode — Auto-Accept on Submission (a submitted application is accepted at once and a placement is created) or Evaluate Applications (the organization reviews first).
• Commitment & schedule — a minimum weekly-hours expectation, optional preferred start/end dates, and an optional weekly schedule of day-and-time blocks.
• Location and Default Site Supervisor — both scoped to the position's organization, so you only pick that org's sites and contacts.
• Planned placements — how many students the position can take; it fills and closes automatically as students are accepted.

Like job postings, partner-created positions are reviewed by seminary staff before they are published to students.

Limiting an organization to certain types. By default an organization that offers internships may post any type. To restrict it — for example to let only vetted hospitals offer Chaplaincy — list the approved types under the organization's Allowed Internship Types (Partner Organization → Internships). An empty list means any type; a non-empty list is enforced when a position is saved.

Applications

An Internship Application (Desk → Internship Application) is one student's application to a position. A student may hold one live application per position.

Eligibility is gated by graduation. A student may apply only when their active program enrollment has an open requirement of the position's type (the type's Graduation Requirement Item). On submission the application resolves and records that requirement row; if the student has no open requirement of that kind, the application is refused. (When a type maps to no graduation requirement item, the internship is ungated and anyone may apply.)

Acceptance is either automatic (auto-accept positions) or a staff/partner action (evaluate positions). On acceptance the application assigns a faculty advisor if the type opts in, snapshots its Application-scope requirements, and creates a first placement.

Status reflects onto the audit. As the application advances, the linked graduation requirement row mirrors it — Completed fulfils the requirement; a rejection or withdrawal releases the row so the student can apply elsewhere.

Placements

An Internship Placement (Desk → Internship Placement) is a single site fulfilling an application — its organization, site supervisor (a contact of that organization), actual start/end dates, allocated hours, and status. Most internships have exactly one; a multi-site type may have several, up to its Max Sites — but a second (or later) site requires the registrar to tick Multi-Site Approved on the application first, so splitting an internship across organizations is always a deliberate decision. Hours logged at a placement roll up to the application, and the placement's own Placement-scope requirements are snapshotted when it is created.

Only contacts marked Can Supervise Interns on the organization are offered as site supervisors (every contact is eligible by default; uncheck the flag to block a specific person). The placement also shows the student's and supervisor's gender read-only, so the registrar can weigh a match during approval — this is informational only and never enforced. Gender is recorded on each person's Person record (the shared identity behind every role), so it is entered once and reused everywhere.

Requirements

An Internship Requirement is a live deliverable, snapshotted from a template onto an application (Application-scope) or a placement (Placement-scope). It shows each party their label, instructions, and any blank form to fill, and collects their submission. It is Completed when every party that must sign has signed; a waiver is available for exceptions. Mandatory requirements are what the seminary expects finished before the internship is marked done.

Logging hours

Hours are recorded as Internship Hours Log rows against a placement — a date, a number of hours, and a short description. Whether a row counts toward the total depends on the type's Hours tracking mode:

Mode	A logged row counts…
Portal Daily Log	immediately
Portal Daily Log with Supervisor Confirmation	only once the site supervisor marks it verified
Submittable Log	once the placement's designated hour-log requirement is signed complete

Counted hours roll up to the placement and then to the application, so a student (and their advisor) always see progress toward the required total.

Evaluations and feedback

Two structured forms close out a placement:

• Internship Supervisor Evaluation — the site supervisor rates the intern's ministry readiness, theological integration, relational skills, and initiative, adds comments, and may endorse the student for ministry.
• Student Internship Feedback — the student's confidential view of the placement: an overall rating, supervision quality, spiritual-formation value, workload, whether they would recommend it, and free-text highlights, concerns, and suggestions for the seminary.

Working from Desk

Until the partner and student portals ship, staff run the whole flow from Desk. To make that practical, turn on Allow Staff to Submit/Sign on Behalf of Any Party under Seminary Settings → Internships: with it on, a registrar or faculty member may fill and sign any party's requirement submission directly, without a portal round-trip. The sign-off still records which staff member acted.

Seminary Settings → Internships also controls:

• Show Ungated Internships to All Students — an internship type with no graduation requirement mapped is "ungated". Off (default), such internships are Desk-only and hidden from the student portal, so a forgotten requirement isn't silently exposed; on, they are shown to every student (an intentional open internship).
• What partners see when evaluating — by default a partner reviewing applicants sees only the applicant's name. Opt in per field to also share the applicant's program, credit hours passed, GPA, and/or expected graduation.

Reports & notifications

• Internship Placement Roster (Desk → report) — every placement with its student, organization, supervisor, status, and hours progress (logged / allocated / % done), filterable by status, type, and organization. The registrar's at-a-glance view of who is interning where and how far along.
• Notifications — starter communication triggers ship for the key student moments: application accepted, rejected, and completed. Edit the wording, change the audience, or disable any of them under Communication Trigger on the desk; they send through the consent-aware, rate-limited communication ledger, so they never spam.

Quick reference

If you want to...	Do this
Offer a new kind of internship	Create an Internship Type (hours, tracking, graduation requirement, optional course)
Define its deliverables	Add Internship Requirement Templates to the type (scope, due rule, party sets)
Auto-assign advisors	Turn on Auto-Assign Faculty and list advisors with caps
Let an org offer a slot	Create an Internship Position (acceptance mode, commitment, schedule)
Let a student apply	Create an Internship Application — eligibility is checked against their open graduation requirement
Accept without review	Set the position's Acceptance Mode to Auto-Accept on Submission
Track a second site	Allow Multi-Site on the type, then add another Internship Placement
Record hours	Add Internship Hours Log rows to the placement; verify them if the type requires it
Make the internship count toward a degree	Map the type to a Graduation Requirement Item, and add a matching Linked Document requirement to the program (Allowed documents)
Do it all from Desk	Turn on staff-proxy under Seminary Settings → Internships

Related

• Graduation Requirements — internships fulfil a Linked Document requirement and appear on the Program Audit.
• Enrollment — the student's program enrollment is what an internship is gated against and reflected onto.
• Grading — a course-backed internship carries its grade through the normal course-enrollment machinery.