Recreation, Park, and Tourism Management Student Engagement Experience
Pre-Internship Requirement:
The purpose of the 300 hour pre-internship engagement requirement is for students to get experience in the field as well as help to define career goals. The 300 hour experience should be viewed as a stepping stone for an amazing internship that will launch your career.
- The 300 hour experience can be either paid experience or volunteer experience.
- Students can use from one to six experiences to complete 300 hours
- Each experience used must be a minimum of fifty on-site agency hours. A variety of experiences can be used to reach the fifty-hour minimum provided that they occurred at the same agency and were supervised by an agency professional.
- Each experience must be under the direct supervision of a full-time supervisory-level employee of the agency.
- Prior work and volunteer hours can be used provided that the experience(s) occurred following the student’s matriculation at Penn State or any other university/college.
- Work and volunteer experiences used to complete course requirements may be acceptable (e.g., RPTM 236, RPTM 456) provided that only on-site agency hours are used to meet the minimum fifty-hour on-site requirement.
- Work and/or volunteer experiences should be within the parameters of the career options within the field of recreation, park, and tourism management under advisement of the academic adviser or RPTM faculty member. Students should consult with the internship coordinator (prior to participating in the experience) to verify that their work and/or volunteer experiences meet the intent of the 300-hour requirement.
- For-credit experiences in RPTM such as Outdoor School, Guest Activities Practicum, Oudoor Recreation Consortium, etc. may be approved for seventy-five hours total.
Experiences that do not count toward 300 hours include:
- Working retail in a sport-related store (e.g., Dicks, Appalachian Outdoors)
- Lifeguarding, ski patrol, equipment manager, etc. that are not direct service delivery roles may be limited to 50 hours.
- Working in restaurants or other food and beverage outlets, unless the student time was largely spent coordinating and implementing special events
- Working online or from home for an agency unless it has been approved by the internship coordinator in advance of the experience.
Verification form
Students must use the 300-Hour Verification Form to complete their 300-hour verification. After completing the hours, students should TYPE the information into the form and then ask the supervisor to sign the form. The supervisor may make handwritten comments in the comment box. The forms can be submitted to the internship coordinator via email attachment as they are completed (the internship coordinator will keep them on file) or may be held by the student and submitted with the completed internship pre-requisite packet prior to the due date each semester. The internship coordinator is Patty Kleban email: plk4@psu.edu.
300-Hours Form
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