FRENCH PSYCHOLOGY STUDENTS’ “INTERNSHIP POLICIES” BETWEEN INSTITUTIONAL REGULATIONS AND DEREGULATIONS
Psychology internships are a key component of a psychologist’s curriculum. However, the difficulty in finding a psychology internship in France is well known and appears as an expected challenge for students. To our knowledge, though dealing with the many constraints and regulations of the internship experience seems to put students in a particular state of mind and induce certain behaviors, the process of finding an internship has yet to be studied by French psychological research. We thus gathered qualitative data (anecdotes from our fieldwork journals, excerpts from cover letters and meeting reports) through participant observation in our respective Universities to illustrate how psychology students elaborate “internship policies” during their curriculum. Such policies are the result of subjective negotiations between institutional and individual regulations and deregulations. We argue a student’s autonomy vis-à-vis these injunctions leads to adopting a position of self-entrepreneur of his psychology curriculum to deal with the rarefaction of offers and competition between peers. Our paper therefore argues for more research to be done on the internship experience of psychology students, so that this crucial element of the student curriculum becomes an object for thought and a real path to professional empowerment.