Information for Employers

Our goal is to assist well-qualified students and interested businesses in finding one another for an internship experience that is beneficial to all parties! Email the Internship Coordinator, Dr. Ron Guidry at rguidry@ilstu.edu or call (309) 438-2968 if you have any questions.

General Information about Accounting Internships

Background of Potential Interns

Potential Interns range from students who have completed their junior year to seniors and graduate students who may be a semester away from graduating. These students will have completed two semesters of introductory accounting, two semesters of intermediate accounting, one semester of managerial/cost accounting, one semester of statistics, and have shown competency in MS Office programs such as Excel. They will have completed a number of Illinois State ’s general education courses, including courses in composition (writing) and speech communication. In addition, they will most likely be taking, or have recently completed, business core courses in finance, law, management, and marketing.

What You Should Expect from an Intern

You should expect an academically successful student who want to apply the concepts learned in the classroom to "real world" settings. We encourage any student with a GPA of 3.0 or better to consider an internship experience. The internship coordinator will work with you to pre-screen potential applicants who meet your internship criteria, GPA, course background, time commitments to your firm, and other criteria your have established. A minimum GPA of 2.8 is required for junior level internships and a minimum GPA of 3.2 is required for senior and graduate level internships.

Length of an Internship

Most internships last for one semester or one summer. If it is better for your firm to seek students who can continue working after the academic term is completed, please let the internship coordinator know that to assist in pre-screening.

What We Request of You

The purpose of the internship is to provide real-world accounting work experience for a student. As such, we seek internships that will provide good training and exposure to the accounting discipline to give students a chance to see their classroom discussions “become real” on-the-job. It is helpful to us if you create a position description which we can keep on file. The position description should describe the general duties and your expectations for your interns; we can use these to help the pre-screening process and to inform qualified students of available positions. The description can also be used as the basis of an “agreement” with the intern so both parties know from the beginning what the job duties will be to better judge the intern’s performance during their time with you.

Once you have offered the student an internship position and they would like academic credit for their internship experience, we ask you provide the student internship employment verification which they will forward to the internship coordination, so we have a record of the intern's employment.

We do ask that the intern’s supervisor provide us with two evaluations, one at mid-semester and one at the end of the semester. The internship coordinator will email evaluations at mid-term and end of the semester. These evaluations are important to the intern, as they comprise a major portion of his/her semester grade for the internship.