Modeling Determinants of Undergraduate Computing Students' Participation in Internships

Abstract

Internships provide opportunities for computing students to self-evaluate their interests and develop authentic technical and professional skills that are critical to a career in computing-related industries. However, it is a cause for concern that only 60% of computing students participate in an internship before graduation. Our work aims to identify the factors which are associated with the likelihood of a student's participation in an internship. To identify these factors, we designed a cross-sectional study at a large public university in the United States. 518 computing undergraduate students completed our survey, and we used a quantitative approach to model a student's ability to secure internships. Using a logistic regression model, we found that (1) year in school, (2) household income (a proxy for socioeconomic status), (3) involvement in activities outside the curriculum, and (4) lower identity diffusion scores (i.e., low exploration and low commitment) are significantly associated with a student's participation in an internship. Our findings confirm prior work which showed that factors outside the curriculum are at play for students' internship participation. Further, we add to the computing education research literature the unexplored relationship between computing students' identity formation and participation in internships.