CHAPTERl
LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE
As you begin your internship, you are embarking on an experience that could change your life. Your internship experiences (as well as your other life experiences) hold great potential for learning and development. Sometimes this learning and development takes place automatically or without a conscious desire to learn, but most often, learning from experience takes place when we make a conscious effort to observe, reflect upon, and analyze our experiences. Therefore, what you learn or bring away from your internship and life experiences is largely up to you! Taking an active role in directing your learning will make your internship experience worthwhile and productive.
You invested a great deal of time preparing for your internship and you are now investing a lot of time and energy into completing it successfully. Hopefully, you are now also asking yourself questions about how to make these investments payoff. How does one learn from experience? This unit will discuss theories related to learning from experience. Learning from experience (also termed "experiential learning") is an exciting activity and there are many speculations and theories that discuss the ways in which learning from experience (experiential learning) takes place.
The question of how we learn is one that has been pondered by philosophers, scientists, educators, and learners throughout history. Questions regarding what we should learn and what we might learn have also been raised throughout time. As an intern and a college student, one of your primary goals is to ponder the questions regarding learning for yourself How do you learn best? What do you think you should learn? What do you think you might learn? What do you desire to learn? What exactly is learning? How do you gain knowledge? How can you make your knowledge work for