Types of internships

An internship as an elective during the Master’s phase

In both our Bachelor and Master programmes, courses are available to students to do a work experience internship in for extra credits. In this internship, the student is asked to apply knowledge and skills as gained in their study programme to practice, giving them more of a grasp what the job market actually looks like and get to learn about, and develop themselves as, professionals. What you will get out of this is not only a very motivated student to help your organization grow or develop (the internships are not mandatory and therefore ask for an extra investment for the student!), but also access to state of the art knowledge the student has just learnt in other courses.

Research internship for a final-year thesis

A student doing a research internship combines an internship with writing a thesis. The student conducts research into a particular phenomenon, using your company and the available data as an example. The results generated by the research may provide information that benefits your business operations. The focus in this type of internship is on conducting research and writing a thesis. It may be possible to combine this with ‘working’ for your company, but this is something you should discuss with the student in question.

The thesis that the student writes during the research internship will be published in the University of Groningen’s public database. This is compulsory in view of knowledge sharing. If the thesis contains confidential information about your company, the student can remove this part of the information at your request. An amended version will then be published in the database.

Voluntary internship

In some cases, there will be no internship course available to a student, or he/she would rather do an internship without University involvement for other reasons. We call these internships ‘voluntary internships’. For these internships, because University has no role in them, and therefore no guidance or control is in place, University can not sign any legal documents concerning the internship, including an internship agreement.

When the internship is done in the Netherlands and the student has an EU/EER nationality, this is no problem. In these cases, you as an organization can draw up a bilateral internship agreement with the student, making clear this is a learning experience instead of disguised employment. We advise to agree upon aspects like learning goals, guidance, ways of working, leave days, financial compensation, insurance, etc.

The only exception to this is when the intern you want to hire is in the Netherlands on a permit or study purposes. In such cases, organizations always should be able to show a tripartite internship agreement, with co-signing of University, acknowledging that the internship is indeed done for study purposes. Therefore, you can only hire non-EU/EER interns who do their internship as part of their studies (meaning: for credits).