The effect of internship on student's future career choice. A case study of school of statistics and planning

Abstract

With internship, students determine if they have an interest in a particular career and also internship adds to one’s curriculum vitae. Some interns find permanent employment with the organizations from where they do their field attachment and this can be beneficial to the employer as it requires little or no training. The main objective for carrying out the study was to investigate if internship really influences the choice of a student’s future career. . The data was collected using the questionnaires was analyzed using a statistical package called “STATA” .The analysis was at three levels i.e. univariate level, bivariate level and multivariate level At univariate level, local government was the sector in which most of the respondents interned (29.69%) followed by ministry(24.22%) and insurance is where the least number interned (8.59%). At bivariate level, there was a significant relationship between the sector interned in and the future career choice since the p-value is less than 0.05. Students who interned in local gov’t, ministry, and private companies were less likely to choose a career in financial institutions compared to government institutions since their RRR was less than 1 according to the multivariate analysis. This is because financial institutions always tend to have lower salaries and other work related benefits compared to government institutions. The findings revealed that internship truly affects the choice of career a student chooses because most of the internship characteristics used in the analysis showed that there is a relationship between internship and future career choice. The relative risk ratio used in multivariate analysis also showed that internship characteristics are more likely to influence a student on what future career to choose. Further studies about internship are recommended to further inform students about the problems they could face during internships to help them prepare for such problems in advance so as to have perfect internship periods and proper preparation of students by Universities for internship.