Internships
Our Community
History Internships In the community
Our goal is community engagement.
The USF Department of History Internship Program is designed with the Tampa Bay area community in mind. While the goal of any internship program is to provide students with ‘real-world’ experience to support their future careers, we also understand that this ‘real-world’ sits within our vibrant and growing communities, and that success depends on our students’ ability to serve the community that surrounds them. The overall goal of our internship program is to help our students to ‘do history’ in the world and gain an understanding of how historians contribute to the public sphere in a wide variety of ways.
The HIS 4940 History Internship course is designated by the university as a “Service Learning” experience, which means that our relationship with our community partners and internship providers is intended to be reciprocal. When our community partners open their time and institutions to train our students, we hope to also support the success of our community.
As “One USF”, our internship program serves students from the Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Sarasota-Manatee campuses, so we look forward to expanding our partnerships across the Bay Area!
How to Become a Community Partner
Submit an Expression of Interest form here
Are you interested in working with the USF Department of History Internship Program, and hosting one or more of our talented students in internship positions? We have established our Internship Program on an innovative model that unites coursework with onsite internship work to ensure that the student interns’ academic needs are met, and that our onsite partners receive consistent performance from the interns they take on. This means that the onsite internship supervisors are not responsible for any curriculum programming and can focus on introducing their interns to what it is like to work in their field and providing real-world experience.
We work with students who bring a variety of experience levels to the table and are therefore open to both paid and unpaid internship positions. Many of our student interns are undergraduates looking to explore a field that they have an interest in, but no previous experience, and an unpaid exploratory internship position is usually the best fit here. We also have more experienced students, such as Graduate Students and students who have already completed a term of internship experience, who would be best suited for paid positions when and if they are available. In all cases, the Internship Coordinator works with our community partners to establish a relationship from which all can benefit!
Our students are asked to commit a minimum of 6 hours per week to their onsite internship work, in addition to their enrollment in the concurrent history course. In the case of paid internships, or second-term internships, hours commitments may vary.
Contact Dr. Jennifer Knight with any questions, or submit our online interest form today!
our current community partners
- The Tampa Bay History Center
- Safety Harbor Museum and Cultural Center
- The Dunedin Historical Museum
- The Henry B. Plant Museum
- Cracker Country Florida History Museum
- The Florida Museum of Photographic Arts
- Sulphur Springs Museum and Heritage Center
- American Victory Ship Mariners Memorial Museum (Video)
- Polk Museum of Art
- The Ybor City Museum
- St. Petersburg Museum of History
- WUSF Public Media
- La Gaceta Newspaper
- Florida PIRG (Public Interest Research Group)
- USF Humanities Institute
- Abby’s Organic Community Farm
- USF Libraries
- The City of Tampa Archive
- Hillsborough County Public Library Cooperative
- Bok Tower Gardens Library and Archive
- The USF Institute for Digital Exploration
- USF Access 3D Lab