Internship Report Guidelines


The internship report is a major summative report of the experience - The CS curriculum at TCNJ requires three writing intensive courses. This is the final of such courses, and as such we expect college senior level writing and production. That is, the report shall be no less than 20 double-spaced pages, include page numbering, appropriate sectioning, citations, and references. The 20 pages requirement does not count the title page, a table of contents (if applicable), the references section or any back-matter (appendices). Any code examples cannot appear in the body of the paper, they have to be placed in an appendix (and properly referenced in the body). Figures and tables can be used and are encouraged for explanatory purposes, but please make sure that text comprises the majority of your document, because of the writing requirement.

Your supervisor/manager is welcome to review your report (I encourage it). Please account for this review time, if applicable, before you submit your report on canvas.

The following guidelines assume that you are registered in CSC399 in the Fall, having performed your internship during the summer. In all other cases due dates and other time periods will vary.

The report is due before the first day of classes in the Fall. Please submit your report on canvas under the appropriate assignment. The document has to be in pdf format. Although it is very probable that you will be asked for revisions during the semester, you are expected to submit your "final version". Incomplete documents will incur a penalty. The review and edit cycle will continue until the work is satisfactory.

I expect to commence reading the reports within the first two weeks of the semester, but it may be two months before I can read them all. I expect to be done with the editing cycle by early November at the latest. Extensions to the due date will not be given, and late submissions will impact your internship grade.

The finalized version of your report is due before the last day of classes.

Reports should encompass the background of the work (what does the company do?), detail the work you accomplished during the internship (in some cases this may be multiple projects), discuss any design work / challenges, implementation approaches / problems, explain how you achieved learning new technical content/materials (did you take a workshop? learn via a book or web site, etc).

The length of the report should give you a good idea that we are seeking a very complete review of the experience. You should also consider including sections on extension points to the work (if someone was going to extend your work, what would they do?).

You can find a sample report here and under Pages on canvas for your consideration and reference.

Confidentiality [IMPORTANT]

When you write your paper, you must honor the confidentiality agreement between your employer and yourself. As soon as you start writing your paper, consult your on-site professional about what you can write. To protect yourself, you should obtain permision of the on-site professional (preferably in writing) before submiting any draft of your paper to the faculty internship supervisor.