Working on your internship report

Instead of producing a traditional thesis, as covered in our other post, some students in the School of Management – and perhaps some in other Cranfield Schools too – will embark upon on an internship at the end of their course.

It is likely that you will be given a real-world management question to work on which will usually be defined by your internship provider. In the School of Management, this will form the basis of your final internship report which will therefore be less of a traditional thesis and more of an evidence-based management project. If this sounds familiar, read on!

Researching an internship report requires you to refine your research question in liaison with your company, to gather information from a variety of sources to research the topic and to use the evidence you find in the literature to support your arguments and conclusions.  You will need to write a literature review, so you will need to make use of our business resources, including searching for academic articles in our journal databases, looking for background information on the company and industry you are working in, and potentially looking for company financials.

If you need to carry out a survey as part of your research, you may wish to make use of Qualtrics software available from IT. More information about Qualtrics is available here (login required). Please contact the IT service desk if you have any questions using this. Some hints and tips on creating surveys can be found in the Cranfield Study Skills Hub.

Do bear in mind that the vast majority of our library resources are available both on- and off-campus – so you can use them from your internship and from home. They are best accessed via the School of Management Library website or the Kings Norton Library site.

Please do get in touch if you need any help and advice. We can be contacted at any time via email and we will get back to you as soon as we can.

Good luck with your research!

Featured image from Pixabay.