Internships and occupational commitment of college students in IT-related majors

We conducted two linked studies of students in IT-related majors who were recently or currently involved in some type of pre-professional work activity such as an internship. In the first study, we interviewed students to obtain their impressions of the occupational subculture of IT. Verbatims from interviews with the students, along with tallies of the categories of their responses, suggested that pre-professional experiences had given these students a realistic preview of IT occupational subculture. In the second study, we transformed the impressions we had received from the student interviews into a set of evaluative dimensions relevant to the characteristics of IT occupational subculture. We devised survey items to assess these evaluative dimensions, and then administered the survey to N=221 students to see if any differences existed among students grouped by gender or ethnicity. Finally, we used our measures of these evaluative dimensions to predict an outcome variable relevant to persistence in IT, namely occupational commitment. Some differences did arise among different groups of students, and some of the evaluative dimensions were useful in predicting occupational commitment.