Welcome mentors and students!
This summer you will be participating in the first-ever Longwood University Therapeutic Recreation Program remote internship. In other words, the internship will be held entirely online. While this is new to allied health professions like recreational therapy, it is something that has been accomplished in other industries like business and marketing for decades. Therefore, in order to develop a meaningful experience for all involved, we have adopted some of the evidence-based techniques that have been shown to be most successful. The three primary elements of the internship include Longwood blogs, the incorporation of a mentorship program, and the use of a craft book.
The Blog:
Each student will develop a blog the first week of the internship which will become the vessel for their work, tracking participation, and communications.
Mentor-Protege Program:
In the literature, mentors are commonly used in remote or virtual internships and have been shown to be highly impactful both for the mentor and the mentee. This relationship is different from a typical intern-site supervisor relationship. By definition, a mentor is “an experienced and trusted advisor”, as such the goal for this internship is for the student to become a protege, to learn by getting to know their mentor on a deeper level and asking, listening, and absorbing the years of experience their mentor brings to the table.
Book Club:
Finally, the third component is the use of a craft book. Not an arts and craft book, rather, the craft book referred to here is used to teach, through writing and reflection, professional growth and development skills necessary to execute their craft. One’s craft is “a profession that requires a particular set of skills and knowledge”. This is certainly true of RT. While APIE and other RT concepts are essential skills, and you will learn those during this internship, learning to be a professional is also important. To help you do that, as a class, we will read Atomic Habits by James Clear (2018) and hold weekly book club meetings to discuss how by making 1% improvements one-day-at-a-time, we can develop productive, professional skills that will last a lifetime.
I am very excited to set out on this new adventure with all of you. I would like all of you to think of yourselves as explorers that are working together to push the boundaries of what has been done and to discover new possibilities for the field of RT. I have no doubt that we are making history with the work we are doing this summer.