Introduction

Although there is widespread agreement among public administration and associated faculties that internship can contribute towards relating classroom learning to real-life practice, Taiwan did not witness its first internship programme until 1999. Despite a slow start, the growing number of internship programmes could be a positive sign for public administration education. Although literature on medical or educational internship exists, there is a paucity of public administration and management literature on the subject. More alarming is the fact that, with the exception of a single conference paper, there is no systematic research describing and assessing the achievements of internship programmes in Taiwan.

This is most likely due to the fact that few coordinators of internship programmes at specific universities have presented their internships consistently, with coordinators ignorant of programmes at other universities.

Furthermore, information presented on the homepages of various departments reveals little of value. Beyond the vague notion that the internship exercise aims to help students relate the theory taught in their course to what happens in practice there is a general lack of clarity about the objectives pursued as put forward by the various training documents released by individual universities.

For this reason, there exists a pressing need to examine both the successes and limitations of Taiwan's various internship programmes run by departments of public administration and related fields. More specifically, the chapter endeavours to identify: what internship programmes look like in general; what typical problems departments have to deal with in regard to internship; what observations supervisors of host agencies made of interns during their internship; how interns reflect what they have experienced. This study is based on analysis of six student internship journals of Shih Hsin University (SHU), as well as in-depth personal interviews with two agency supervisors (S) and three programme coordinators (C), and one intern (I) from another university.

This chapter considers internship to be a form of learning which can contribute to effective public administration and management. To maintain a comprehensive perspective across various departments of public policy, public administration and public management and related fields, this chapter follows Chauhan (1977: 197–212) and Baker (2003: 233–238) by focusing on the identification of three dimensions of interagency relationships, namely, college internship coordinators, students (interns) and host organisation supervisors, concerning Taiwanese internship programmes.