Internship Experience in Architecture and Interior Architecture Departments from Students' Point of Views

Internship is an important part of the education system which enables students to consolidate the knowledge gained from practical and theoretical courses by various field experiences and implementations. Despite the proven great advantages of the internship training for the education process, it is observed that the architecture and interior architecture education system in Turkey give less importance to the internship compared to the western countries and it has also been observed that there is a large gap in terms of the studies and researches related to this field in Turkey. For this purpose, a survey study was conducted with 2nd and 3rd grade students who completed their summer internship at Antalya Bilim University in 2019. The survey was aimed to raise awareness of the place of the internship in the education system with all the positive and negative experiences that might be contributed to the students. The survey was carried out according to three phases of the internship process. First phase is related to the preinternship period in order to understand the students' experiences before finding the internship institutions. The second stage is about the internship period for recognizing student experiences during the internship implementations. The third stage is related to the post-internship period to get the experiences gained after the internship. Accordingly, the survey results were evaluated in terms of the role of the internship experience in the architecture and interior architecture education processes and its importance in the professional life were examined.