Food Science & Technology 589 — Professional Experience

General expectations and requirements

This course requires permission of the instructor prior to enrollment. Permission will be granted once a suitable internship has been arranged. As soon as you have the information you should provide the instructor with the following information:

Name of the company you will work for

Name, address, phone number and email (if available) of your supervisor

A brief description of what your duties will be

The grade for FST 589 will have two components:

Daily Journal 30%

Paper 70%

 

Journal
Keep a journal of your work experiences. In this you should briefly describe your experiences and how you utilized information gained from your academic program to solve problems. You should also reflect on the problems you faced and discuss possible solutions to them. Successes and failures should be noted. These journals may be of use to you when you begin interviewing and are faced with: "Give me an example of when you demonstrated creativity in solving a problem, or Describe a situation in which you successfully interacted with people from different cultures in order to achieve a goal, etc".

Paper
Upon completion of the internship, the student is to hand in a paper describing the work experience. The paper should concentrate on one activity and should be discussed with the instructor prior to the start of the internship. The exact material to be discussed in the paper will vary, but the paper should take a problem solving approach. Your paper should describe how you helped to solve a problem and how you used the material you have learned at OSU was related to solving this problem. The length of the paper will vary, but should generally be 8 to 10 pages of double spaced type. In some cases, with prior approval of the instructor and the employment supervisor, an oral presentation may be substituted for the paper. The material to be covered should be essentially the same. Students who do an oral report still must submit the journal and the material listed in number 7 in writing.

The problem may relate to product quality, development of new products, compliance with regulations or a number of other similar areas. It may also relate to management and motivation of people. Once you kno what you experience will involve, you should begin to consider how you might be able to define a problem. Prior discussion of your approach with the instructor is probably a good idea.

The major portions to be included in the paper are:

1. Corporate background - use this portion of the paper to describe the company you worked for. Provide a brief history, a summary of the types of products produced at your location and how your locations fits into the larger corporate structure.

The remained of the paper will be modeled after a research publication and should include the following for a particular problem that you worked on.

2. Introduction - the introduction should provide a background that describes the nature of the problem and its importance.

3. Previous work - depending on the nature of your problem this section may include a description of past approaches that have been used to solve the problem.

4. Approach - this section of the paper will describe the methods you used to attempt to solve the problem. It may include an experimental design.

5. Results - This portion of the paper documents the results that were obtained. They may vary greatly in form. Some projects may include several tables of data, while others may describe an outcome in rather subjective terms.

6. Discussion - this may be a separate section or may be included with the results section. In either case, the results that were obtained should be discussed and related to what was previously known. This is where you can try to explain why something did or did not work.

7. Appendix - There is no place for this in a normal research paper, but here you should reflect on the value of the experience. Describe the positive aspects of the experience. If there were things that detracted from it, they should be described and suggestions should be made on how to minimize them in the future. Consider the following list of questions and answer as many as you feel are appropriate:

• Was the experience worthwhile?
• Would you recommend it to someone else?
• What could the department do to make the experience better?
• Can you give examples of how you used material you learned in courses during the internship?
• Has this changed your career objectives?

Questions can be addressed to:

Mike Mangino, Professor

Department of Food Science & Technology

The Ohio State University

2121 Fyffe Road

Columbus, OH 43210

(614) 292-7769

Mangino.2@OSU.edu