Work Experience

This coming fall I will be a senior in Family and Consumer Sciences Education. As you may know, a lot of majors on campus either require or highly suggest that you complete an internship before you graduate. However, for Family and Consumer Sciences Education it’s a little different. Before you graduate you are required to complete 1,500 supervised work experience hours or 4,000 unsupervised work experience hours. I know in writing this may seem overwhelming, but in reality it’s not. If you had a job throughout high school and it relates to the major you can count those hours towards your unsupervised hours. Once you get accepted to Purdue, any work you complete that relates to Family and Consumer Sciences or lab that is required for the major counts as supervised hours.

This summer I am working on 300 more hours to complete my work experience requirement. I feel that this is a very good requirement for our major, because it pushes you to get a job that is already related to something you could be doing in the future. It’s a lot like an internship, but instead of having to complete it in a short period of time, you can take all 4 years to finish it. Completing my work experience has been very helpful to me because I have learned a lot about the content of my major without even opening a book. I was able to learn hands on, which will help me to teach my students in the future.

Talk to you again soon!

--- Bridget Gehlhausen