Internships

All undergraduate and graduate students in the Department of History may earn course credit while completing an internship that will give them valuable work experience in a history-related field.

Internships provide opportunities for experiential learning and allow students to use the historical skills they have developed in the classroom in a professional setting, most commonly at museums, historical sites or non-profit organizations. Interns might conduct historical research for an exhibit, collect oral histories for a museum or archive, design and conduct visitor surveys for a historical site or document historically significant cultural or architectural resources. You can locate internship opportunities on the websites of individual cultural institutions whose mission interests you, on the websites of the National Council on Public History, the American Association of State and Local History, the Michigan Museum Association, PreserveNet and by subscribing to the University of Delaware's MuseWeekly newsletter.

Internships are only required of students in the MAPH program, but all undergraduate history majors and graduate students are strongly encouraged to consider participating in our internship program because work experience is increasingly required even for entry-level jobs. Many students choose to intern at local cultural institutions such as the Detroit Historical Museum, The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation or the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. Others have completed internships at sites as diverse as Colorado's Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum and Wayne State University Press.

Download Department of History Internship Handbook

Forms

For students

For host institutions

Scholarships

Wayne State offers scholarships to offset the cost of tuition for students enrolled in HIS 4997 or HIS 7998 while completing an internship.