What every employer should know about the Human Centered Design & Engineering Internship Program at the University of Washington.
Internships
Each undergraduate HCDE student must complete a minimum of either 2 or 4 credits of experiential learning, depending on when they entered the major, in order to graduate. For many of our students that experience comes in the form of an internship. For the internship to apply towards student degree requirements, it must be completed in the same quarter as an internship course for which students must register by the quarterly deadline, pay the associated course fee and/or tuition, and complete the accompanying course assignments, in addition to meeting their responsibilities to their employers. HCDE undergraduates register for this course as ENGR 321 while graduate students register for HCDE 601. Note: Registration for ENGR 321 is managed by the Career Center @ Engineering (CC@E), not the HCDE Department.
Academic credit for internships is variable, but should be based on the number of hours per week that a student is completing in their internship. Students registering for ENGR 321 can register for either one or two credits per quarter and should refer to the information on the CC@E website for guidance on how this relates to their internship hours.
Students registering for HCDE 601 may take as few as two or as many as ten credits per quarter. For each credit, the student agrees to spend 3 hours per week working for their internship employers, or 30 hours total over a 10-week quarter. For example, a student who is taking a 5-credit internship would be expected to work an average of 15 hours per week or 150 hours total over a 10-week quarter. Please note that these are minimum requirements for earning academic credit. Employers and students are welcome to negotiate other (greater) commitments as long as they satisfy the minimums established for earning academic credit.
Scheduling an internship
We understand that the rest of the world does not work on an academic calendar. Consequently, students who accept an internship opportunity that begins mid-quarter may register for the associated internship course in a following quarter, as long as the student will be continuing in their internship and completing the course assignments in the quarter in which they are registered. Students cannot defer credit to a quarter in which they will not be doing any work associated with that course credit.
When should you post a position announcement? To ensure that you have an opportunity to evaluate the largest number of student intern applicants, it is best to post an announcement at least two months before the beginning of the quarter for which you anticipate having a student intern working for you. The University's quarters are (approximately) as follows: autumn quarter runs from the end of September to the middle of December; winter quarter runs from the beginning of January to the middle March; spring quarter runs from the end of March to the middle of June; summer quarter runs from third week in June through the third week in August. Additionally, employers should bear in mind that it can take several weeks for international students who have applied for Curricular Practical Training (CPT) to be issued their CPT I-20.
Recruiting and hiring policy
All employment professionals recruiting HCDE students through HCDE and other on-campus recruiting channels, such as the UW Career Center and other established college or university programs, are requested to work within a framework of professionally accepted recruiting, interviewing, and selection practices as stipulated in the NACE Principles for Ethical Professional Practice.