Public Service Internships

The Maguire Center -- with financial assistance from the Irby Family Foundation -- awards summer internships to SMU students who wish to devote time to public service.

Over the past twelve years, we have awarded summer intern stipends to approximately 100 SMU students for public service and research in ethics. We have supported volunteers in over eighty agencies in twelve Texas cities, twelve states, and nine countries outside the USA.

  • For a complete listing of past and present internship placements, click here.
  • For more information about past internships, the 2007 class of public service interns was profiled in this story in the SMU Magazine (Spring/Summer 2007), and SMU Vision published this story about the 2008 program.

LIVES: TOUCH OTHERS', CHANGE YOURS

SMU Public Service Interns have volunteered in a vast number of diverse internship placements.  Through such opportunities, students gain concrete information about others' needs, as well as differing perspectives on how to resolve them. In the process, they draw on their university education and personal talent, honing skills as leaders and gaining both humility and self-confidence. They also gain experience, which illuminates concepts taught in the classroom, and which enables them to engage in public service where financial circumstances might not otherwise allow.

General Guidelines

Applicants are responsible for locating a qualified placement site and securing an agency's agreement to participate. A helpful way to begin thinking about your internship is to consider a volunteer project that interests you. Once you have decided on the kind of work you would like to do, contact an appropriate agency to see if they would sponsor your project. Identify a specific person at the agency to be responsible for supervising your work during the internship. This supervisor must write a letter of agreement to be submitted along with your application and a letter of completion at the conclusion of your internship.

The committee selects the interns based on the following criteria:

  • a well articulated proposal;
  • agreement between sponsoring agency and the student's project description;
  • need for and ethical merit of the proposed project;
  • justice issues it will address and ethics it will help the student to learn; and
  • the role the internship will play in the student's vocational future and maturity.

answers to frequently asked questions

  • For those chosen as interns, the salary is $10.00 an hour for undergraduate students, and $12.00 an hour for graduate students, for not more than 200 hours for the entire summer.
  • The hours are worked during the summer on a schedule mutually agreed to by you and the sponsoring agency. The work must be done between June and August.
  • Students must be returning to SMU in the fall.
  • Recipients will be paid in two equal installments: early June and early September.
  • The internship can be done outside of Dallas.
  • The internship should be a new project. The internship is not meant to further compensate students for work for which they are already receiving payment.
  • Interns may work another job while doing the internship, as long as it does not  interfere with their ability to work the designated hours for the internship.

HOW TO APPLY

Applications for Public Service Internships are posted here late in the fall semester.  We will send out e-mail announcements once the application is available.  The deadline for submission is usually early February, and we notify applicants of the results of our selection process before Spring Break.