Conservation Internships: Building collaborations between conservation organizations, universities, and societies to facilitate student learning, promote diversity, and advance conservation
Session Organizers: Renee Mullen, Tosha Comendant, and Sean Watts

Description:
University courses and graduate programs related to conservation are growing in number and attracting more students.  In addition there is a trend for students to seek application of their training to real world problems and conservation is one of the most obvious arenas for applying science to societal challenges. Internship programs through conservation organizations can provide students with on-the-job experience and opportunities for seeing how training in policy and science might help protect biodiversity.   Well-designed intern programs have the potential to increase current and future capacity within conservation organizations, strengthen ties between conservation organizations and academia, grow and diversify the general conservation constituency, and inspire new ideas in conservation.

Through interviews with conservation organizations and university professors and students, we have seen that conservation internship programs are often ad-hoc, with inconsistent results. This is a concern for conservation organizations, universities, and of course, the interns themselves. On the other hand, there have been successful internship programs, but the lessons-learned are not widely accessible.

We propose bringing together conservation organization staff and donors with university professors, students, and career program staff, to discuss programmatic structures, goals, tests of effectiveness, and lessons learned.  By convening leaders from each of these stakeholder groups, we will be able to compare successes and failures, outline possible future collaborations, and generate ideas for making conservation internships more inclusive, fun, and beneficial for students, universities, and conservation organizations. 
We believe that our discussion group proposal fits squarely within the Society for Conservation Biology's goal of education - specifically in capacity building and supporting future generations of conservation scientists.  We also believe that the conservation community as a whole could benefit tremendously by being more diverse and reaching more people. With that in mind, we hope to focus a significant piece of this discussion on internships as one way to promote inclusiveness in the field of conservation.