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ENGL388M/HNRS379W: Maryland General Assembly Internship: Spring 2016 (Six Credits)
Professor: Dr. Thomas Lowderbaugh
Office: Tawes 1220A
Office Hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays, TBA
Yes, many of you will spend Tuesdays and Thursdays in Annapolis on your internship assignments. Therefore I will happily schedule appointments on other mutually convenient days.
Telephone: 301/405-3774 (the worst way to reach me)
E-mail: (the best way to reach me): Please note that my umd.edu e-mail account feeds into my account. Thus e-mail from me may register my gmail address, even if I’m responding to an e-mail that you sent to my umd address.
Class Sessions: You will negotiate your individual internship schedule with your host office. You should e-mail me your internship schedule as early as possible in your internship. You and I together will negotiate your on-campus conference(s) and my Annapolis site visit.
Pre- or co-requisites: You must have attained junior status (a minimum of 60 credit hours) before you may begin this course. (This is an MGA requirement.) You must also have completed ENGL381 or HNRS368A before beginning this course. (This is a university requirement.)
Course Overview: This course places students in internships in legislative offices in Annapolis. Each intern uses the writing and research skills developed in ENGL381/HRNS368A (the prerequisite for admission to the internship program). Each student is assigned to a Delegate, Senator or caucus, where the student applies his or her academic skills in analyzing, researching and solving real-world problems.
When you negotiate your internship with your host office, make sure that you share with your supervisor the one-page description that I distributed during the fall preparatory course.
Assignments mirror those that the preparatory courses introduced and practiced. Your on-site MGA supervisor will assign you daily projects. This syllabus details the documentation that you must submit to me for me to evaluate and assign you a course grade. Please note the required due dates for you to submit the documents to me.
Typical internship assignments require students to research and produce real documents:
· Responses to constituent correspondence
· Research reports on proposed legislation
· Co-sponsor sign-offs on proposed legislation
· Drafts of a legislator’s official testimony
· Delivery of that legislator’s oral testimony
· Meeting notes
· Newsletter articles or news releases
Legislators or their staff may assign interns other duties as deemed necessary. The interns typically serve from sixteen to twenty hours a week (mid-January to late April), for which they earn a small stipend whose main purpose is to help reimburse travel costs.
My role in the course differs greatly from that of your other instructors. Your on-site supervisors assign you daily projects. I serve as an on-call academic advisor who will evaluate your work for academic credit and a grade.
Required Texts
The course requires no textbook. You should, however, plan to use three websites that can serve as standard reference tools:
· MGA website: http://mlis.state.md.us/: the legislature’s website, which is always the first reference for any research questions
· OWL website: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/: Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab, a reference for writing not just during their internship but also throughout their professional career
· NYT’s blog: “After Deadline” by Philip B. Corbett (published online every Tuesday). Most recent URL: http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/after-deadline/?scp=1-spot&sq=%22after%20deadline%22&st=cse: a regular review of grammatical and punctuation errors that appeared in the New York Times during the previous week, a practical reminder of common writing errors to avoid
As you prepare the portfolios documenting your semester’s work, you may schedule times to study portfolios submitted by earlier interns. (Available during my regular office hours and by appointment.)
Work Requirements
The Maryland General Assembly requires that interns work a minimum of sixteen hours per week from mid-January through the end of April. Most UMCP interns work twenty hours per week. Thus the fifteen-week assignment will require you to work from 240 to 300 hours. During late fall or early winter interviews you must negotiate your regular weekly schedule with the host office. (Consider the interview to be one of your first professional activities.)
Each host office assigns projects to its intern. Interns most commonly research and draft responses to constituent inquiries. Many interns are assigned to research legislation and to deliver various products reporting results of such research. The prerequisite course taught you how to research and write such written products as extremely concise bill summaries, replies to constituent letters, and drafts of a legislator’s official testimony supporting or opposing legislation. Sometimes legislators assign interns to deliver the official testimony on the legislator’s behalf. In some cases, interns have been assigned to coordinate an office’s work in support of proposed legislation: identifying supportive citizen groups and lobbyists, inviting the groups and lobbyists to testify before legislative committees, securing cosponsors for the legislation, and preparing the legislator’s testimony.
Academic Requirements
Supervisors expect that students placed through this program arrive with a high level of rhetorical and professional skills, including facility in conducting legislative research. The kinds of internship assignments will challenge you to synthesize what you have learned throughout your academic career.
You must deliver to me several documents (see schedule below). These documents inform me about your current office assignments and invite you to raise concerns about your placement or to ask about a diplomatic way of resolving some internship problem. (Consider the periodic reports an opportunity to ask me questions or request guidance. The reports thus can foster an ongoing conversation between us.)
At the end of April each student submits a portfolio documenting his/her internship’s work and demonstrating his/her mastery of the research and writing skills developed in the preparatory course. The portfolio’s contents demonstrate how you improved your on-the-job skills, document your internship experience, and inform the instructor of your commitments, accomplishments, and progress.
All documents—whether in hard copy or electronic format—must adhere to professional formats. Deadlines are strict: timeliness is an important professional quality while devising excuses for submitting work late is not.
Friendly Hint: Interns sometimes become so engrossed in their Annapolis duties that they forget to submit required documents to me. You would be wise to create a system to remind yourself to create and submit these assignments on schedule.
Students with a Documented Disability
Students with a documented disability requiring special accommodations should inform me of their disability in a conference during the internship’s first week. Together we will discuss possible accommodations with the appropriate campus officials. You should also discuss necessary accommodations with the MGA’s internship coordinator.
Academic Integrity
Academic integrity is essential in all our work. The prerequisite course’s syllabus contains a discussion of academic integrity, plagiarism and suggestions on how to avoid problems. Interns should ask their supervisor for help if they find themselves confused about to how give credit for words or ideas.
Working in a legislative office—in any organization, for that matter—raises questions of ownership of ideas and language. The prerequisite course examined the concepts of common knowledge, ghostwriting and house style. The internship gives you practice in navigating the challenges and problems that these concepts can raise in practice.
Inclement Weather
You should ask your direct supervisor for your host office’s policies on inclement weather. For example, during the February 2010 blizzards, some offices instructed interns to stay home and stay safe. Other offices told interns that they had the choice of coming to the office on their usual schedule or making up the hours later in the session.
Ask in advance about your office’s inclement weather policy.
No matter the weather, students must, however, continue to submit electronic documents to me according to the published syllabus (including bi-weekly reports).
Religious Observances
You should inform your internship supervisor of any intended absences for religious observance early: ideally at the very beginning of the internship. The supervisor may need to ensure that someone else covers your missed responsibilities. For that reason, you should ask your supervisor how to make up the missed time. (Please do not expect that your supervisor will remember such a planned absence. You should remind your supervisor a week before your expected absence. And then again two days before it.)
Spring Break
Neither legislators nor their staff takes a spring break. They will expect that interns will not take a spring break either. In fact, UMCP’s spring break usually occurs during the legislature’s busiest work, a time when staff will probably need interns even more than at other times during the session.
Assignments and Due Dates: Spring 2016
At the end of the spring 2016 semester you will submit a portfolio that documents your work throughout the semester. This section lists the portfolio’s contents in the order in which I expect to find them.
My review of this portfolio will serve as the basis of one hundred per cent of the grade that I assign you for the course.[1] The portfolio as a whole will be due on Tuesday, April 26. Dates below are highlighted for deliverables due before April 27.
This list of deliverables should provide you with an overview of the work that you will complete by semester’s end. Please note that the portfolio contains documents that you will create during your internship, not a set of documents that you submit for the first time on April 26. Please use this syllabus/assignment sheet as a checklist for assembling your portfolio.[2]
1. Memo of Submittal addressed to me, explaining the portfolio’s contents and evaluating your work for the semester as a whole (April 26, 2016)
2. Updated Resume that incorporates your experience as an MGA intern (April 26, 2016)
3. Learning Objectives and Letter of Understanding: The first of these two documents will specify what you expect to learn during next semester’s internship. The letter of understanding—written by you—will detail your office responsibilities, clarifying what you and your supervisor expect you to perform and accomplish. Both you and your supervisor must sign the document. You should mail me a hard copy of both documents no later than Monday, January 25. Please note: These two documents will define your scope of work in Annapolis and will determine your successes and failures in your work there.
4. Fact Sheet: This one- to two-page document should profile the legislator in whose office you work. This profile—due no later than Monday, February 1 –should answer the following questions:
a. Born when and where? What education? Where?
b. Early career (possibly outside politics)?
c. Political career (possibly solely as a member of the MGA)?
d. Major goals for his/her work in the MGA?
e. Major MGA accomplishments to date?
f. Possible future (political) ambitions?
Please submit this document to me via e-mail.
5. Biweekly Journal Reports: Every two weeks you must deliver to me an informal e-mailed update on your work in Annapolis. As you draft these reports, please remember that I am not present and that I do not know the people with whom you work or the projects that you work on or the places where you work. I expect that you will find that you need to learn a lot very quickly and that you may face some problems as you settle into your routine. Thus descriptions of problems and disappointments will not dismay me. Submit the first report to me on Friday, January 29. The e-mail accompanying the report should schedule a one-on-one conference with me during the first two weeks of February.
6. Memo Preparing Me for a Site Visit: I plan to make at least one site visit to Annapolis. Before we schedule my visit I need from you a list of topics that we should discuss as well as a list of any people to whom you want to introduce me. (February 24 via e-mail)
7. Progress Report: this document will give me a quick overview of the status of you internship, describing both its successes and its failures. The report should also list any questions that you need me to answer. Via e-mail on Friday, March 4.
8. Work Samples (with explanations)
a. Constituent letters
b. News releases
c. Newsletters
d. Testimony
e. Research reports
f. Other documents
You should begin this section with an introduction that explains to me what documents to expect and to give me any background information essential to my understanding the documents and appreciating your rhetorical mastery in writing these documents for the Senator or Delegate for whom you work.
9. Analysis of Placement: This document (probably three to five pages for most interns) will give me an overall understanding of your internship placement. It should answer the following questions:
a. Office Tasks: What exactly did you do for your internship? What were you most important responsibilities? What were your greatest accomplishments?
b. Daily Duties: How did you spend a typical day in your internship?
c. Hours and Policies: What were your typical work hours? What kind of workplace policies structured your work?
10. Policy Analysis: Ideally this analysis should examine a policy debate that rises because of a bill that your member sponsored and thus should draw upon your other internship responsibilities. Your presentation should consist of two parts:
a. Introductory materials that create a context for an outside reader (like me)
i. An explanation of the question to be addressed and a high-level overview of the issues that this question raises
ii. A summary of your research and your preliminary policy findings
b. The formal analysis itself
i. Title page
ii. List of illustrations
iii. Executive summary
iv. Background
v. Current law
vi. Issues raised by the current law
vii. Bills proposed this session to address the issues that the current law raises
viii. Review of how other states address the same issues
ix. Legal concerns that the bill addresses
x. Opponents of the bill: an explanation of the reasons that they oppose this legislation
xi. Proponents of the bill: an explanation of the reasons that they support the legislation