Internships

Gain valuable workplace experience and refine your career goals through an internship experience

MAPW students supplement their coursework by completing a required, advisor-approved professional internship in the corporate or nonprofit sector. Internships provide students with opportunities to integrate and apply what they have learned in the classroom, gain hands-on workplace experience, and refine their career goals and preferences. Students speak highly of their internship experience and consider it an invaluable opportunity, particularly for career-changers and those with little workplace experience.

You will intern during the summer between your second and third semester for 320 hours. This can be: 40 hours during 8 weeks, 32 hours during 10 weeks, or 27 hours during 12 weeks. 

The types and locations of student internships are limited only by each student's interests and initiative. While many employers who have hired our students as interns tend to get in touch each year looking for internship candidates, we do not have a fixed roster of set internships from which students must select an option. We firmly believe that each internship should match students’ specific interests. We work with you through advising and partnering with the university's Career and Professional Development Center to identify (and sometimes even create) appropriate opportunities.

Every summer, we have interns on campus, around Pittsburgh, and throughout the country working in fields as varied as public relations, editing and publishing, media relations, technical writing, web content and design, corporate communications, instructional design, and non-profit communications. While these are the most common areas pursued by students, we are flexible about options and have had students with relevant backgrounds intern in specialized fields such as sports media relations, museum design, healthcare communication, arts marketing, and broadcast news. The overarching goal of the internship program is to help students locate and qualify for internships that position them for the next step in their careers, a full-time position following graduation.