Internship report: why it is important and how to do it

The internship report is a document in which the student presents all of his/her experience acquired during the professional internship , required in the course curriculum and agreed upon in the internship contract . As the name suggests, it is a report of the activities carried out and the learning achieved.

This report is essential for the student and the educational institution to assess the quality of this experience, classifying which are the best opportunities for future interns. It also gives the person the chance to learn more about their professional future, identifying strengths and areas for improvement.

To develop the report, it is a good idea to get into the habit of taking notes throughout the internship. This practice makes it much easier to write the text at the end, when it is time to gather all the information and structure it according to the college’s rules.

What is an internship report for?

The purpose of the internship report is to provide an overview of the work carried out during the period, listing the activities performed, the projects, the skills developed and the challenges faced by the student.

It serves as an academic assessment resource, measuring the student’s professional performance, in addition to verifying their ability to apply the theoretical knowledge developed throughout the course in their daily work.

With the report, the student can also reflect on their experience, as well as identify what the next steps in their professional development will be. Such reflection is valuable for consolidating their knowledge and guiding their future career choices.

There’s more! The report works as a great tool to prove your experience, showing potential employers that you can already perform various tasks in your field. After all, the document proves your skills, competencies and aptitudes.

What precautions should be taken when writing an internship report?

Given the importance of the report, you need to ensure that the document is clear and effective if you want to properly report your experience. Some of the main aspects that should be observed include:

• structure and organization of information : following a clear and standardized structure is the first step to having your report accepted. It must contain an introduction, a description of the organization responsible for the experience, an analysis of the activities, criticisms and conclusions about the activities carried out;
• clarity of content : it is also important to describe the activities carried out in a clear and objective manner, avoiding unnecessary or irrelevant information for the technical assessment. Therefore, use clear, accessible and direct language;
• Highlight the results : give due prominence to the results achieved during the internship, as well as the lessons learned during the experience. In addition to describing the activities, you can show how each of them contributed to your personal development;
• review and correction : after completing the text, carry out a good review to avoid spelling or grammatical errors, in addition to checking whether the construction of ideas is duly clear, cohesive, coherent and objective;
• confidentiality : if you have access to confidential information during your internship, you must respect the organization’s privacy, i.e. avoid including sensitive information in the report.

How does the supervised internship report work?

Supervised internship is a specific modality, in which the completion of activities is monitored by a supervisor designated by the educational institution or entity where the student is completing the internship.

This type of internship is usually a mandatory part of many courses, although there are non-mandatory internships that are equally useful for deepening knowledge. However, in the first case, the report is usually also mandatory.

How does it work? The first step is to identify who your supervisor will be, checking with your course secretary to see if they are available to supervise your internship. This mentor will provide guidelines for your work, answer any questions you may have and provide technical support for carrying out the activities.

Afterwards, it is necessary to prepare an internship plan together with the supervisor, including the objectives to be achieved, the scheduled activities and the resources needed to execute the project.

Once your internship plan has been approved, you can start your activities, keeping a record of everything that is being done with your supervisor. Finally, you just need to prepare the report and submit it for evaluation, as is the case with most internships.

How to prepare an internship report?

Knowing how to write an internship report is important to present the results obtained through this experience. If you need help putting together yours, we have highlighted several relevant points below!

Be careful with pre-textual elements

The pre-textual elements are the face of your report. Therefore, it is worth showing care and following the standards established by the educational institution. There are some elements that are crucial and should not be left out, such as the cover, title page and summary.

Some colleges may also require additional details, such as acknowledgements and a heading. Check the rules for your internship report and include all necessary pre-textual elements correctly.

Make a good introduction

Once you have prepared the pre-textual elements, it is time to start detailing your internship report. You already have a lot of notes — we hope! — so you can now develop a good presentation of the work done by creating your introduction.

Some people like to leave this point for last, and it makes sense, since the introduction will be more aligned with the final report. In any case, be sure to include basic information about the internship: name of the course, educational institution and company where you are carrying out the activities.

Present the development of the internship

You can highlight non-confidential details about the company, such as its name, area of ​​activity, mission and values, as well as what you learned from them. Next, explain how the internship developed .

You can report on the activities carried out, describe what was learned from them and their relationship with the theory seen in the classroom. You can comment on the tools and techniques used, as well as the skills and competencies developed from the practices during the internship.

Perform a critical analysis

It is important to critically analyze the activities you developed and the lessons you learned. Discuss your internship experience and describe the challenges you faced and how you overcame them. Also evaluate the aspects you consider positive and those you think were not so good.

They may involve your posture in the workplace , supervision, learning opportunities, among other aspects. After that, simply complete the report and send it to your supervisor.

How to start an internship report?

Although each educational institution may have an internship report template that should be adopted, this type of document usually presents the basic structure. Check it out!

Pre-textual elements

As mentioned, this first part of the report is made up of some mandatory elements, which are:

• cover page — must contain identifying information about the author of the report and the faculty;
• title page — contains the same information as the cover page, but also a brief description of the nature of the document;
• approval sheet — this is a sheet reserved for the signature of the professional responsible for evaluating the internship report;
• lists — whenever the student includes tables, figures, abbreviations and acronyms throughout the text, it is necessary to list these items separately;
• summary — a list indicating the page numbers on which each step of the report can be found.

In addition to these mandatory elements, it is possible to include acknowledgments, dedication and epigraph — a quote in prose or verse that has some relation to the topic of the report.

Textual elements

Immediately after the pre-textual elements, the report itself begins. Below, we highlight what cannot be missing in this type of academic work .

Introduction

The first item of the textual elements is a succinct presentation of everything that will be explained in more detail in the following sections of the text. In the introduction, the author informs what work was carried out during the internship and establishes its relationship with the course, highlighting its relevance to the training.

Internship objectives

This topic aims to indicate the purposes of the activities carried out during the internship period. It is important to indicate a general objective, that is, the main focus of the internship, and specific objectives, detailing what type of learning was expected to be achieved with the experience.

Organization Description

Here, the author should describe the main aspects of the company that opened its doors to receive him/her. The history of the organization, its market presence, number of employees and the characteristics of the sector in which the internship took place are some of the points that deserve attention.

Activities developed

This should be the longest text element, since it refers to the experiences lived during the internship. It is essential to provide a detailed description of the activities carried out, presenting the work routine at the company and discussing how the knowledge acquired during the undergraduate course could be put into practice.

Final considerations

This is the space to reflect on the internship experience and how it impacted your academic training. It is important to organize your ideas and present them in a clear and objective manner, making a critical analysis of the results achieved.

Post-textual elements

To finalize the internship report, after all the textual part is completed, it is interesting to include the following elements.

Attachments

Attachments allow you to enrich the material and give more credibility to everything reported. You can include something that demonstrates the type of work carried out in the distance learning or in-person internship — for undergraduate internships, for example, one idea is to attach lesson plans — and also photos taken while you were performing the duties.

Glossary

This is a list of words and terms used throughout the text and their respective meanings. It is important to include the glossary whenever there is a high incidence of technical terms.

Bibliographic references

References are the list of works that the student needed to consult to develop the work. They must be listed according to ABNT standards , which define how each type of reference — book, scientific article, web page, among others — must be detailed.