One of the features that is most highly rated by our students is the chance to go away for a period of professional work experience, this being associated with the requirements for the work-experience course component, known as Pràcticum.
During their last academic year of their degree studies, the students have to go on work experience for a certain time in an organisation that is not part of the University. This gives them a chance to get to know, at first hand and from the inside, how public or private institutions, companies and other bodies performing public-interest services work.
This work-experience period is useful for everyone concerned: the students, the organisations, and society. It is useful for the students, in that it enables them to try out the skills they have acquired in their studies, and also to find out whether the kind of work done in the organisation concerned is of interest to them as a career. For the organisations,this work experience gives the people in charge somebody to help out (with no experience but highly qualified in matters relating to public affairs), they being able to ask the students to produce analyses or reports that require all the time of a fully-trained person, or to undertake specific tasks that cannot be done by the organisation’s staff as part of their everyday work. And for society in general, these work-experience periods are useful in that they are a way of spreading awareness of the abilities, knowledge and skills of political scientists, for even though this profession is not very well known yet, it is increasingly in demand. Indeed, many organisations that take students on work experience end up recruiting a political scientist later on when they need to take on more staff. Hence work experience is also a good way for our graduates to find employment.
The organisations offering work-experience opportunities for our students are usually connected in some way with the contents of the course’s syllabus, the following being some examples: