Description of Internship

The internship is an opportunity to work in a private enterprise or public office dealing directly with environmental challenges related to each student’s concentration and the topic for the master thesis. The internship offers valuable practical experience and insight into real-world business or governance challenges. It puts academic learning into a contextual and applied perspective. The internship work is unpaid, and all students will be aligned with a supervisor. Internship is an integrated part of the master thesis research. The students will spend approximately 300 hours (2 months) as interns, preferably in their home countries, before returning to the university for writing the thesis under close academic supervision.

Learning Outcome

On successful completion of the internship, the student should:

• Understand specific challenges regarding social and environmental sustainability in the actual business context

• Be able to demonstrate a strong knowledge of the formal management systems in the company/organization

• Have a solid knowledge of daily challenges in the company towards energy efficiency and ecological footprints

• Be able to support suggestions for practical solutions for improved environmental performance based on academic analyses

• Have a good practical understanding and strong empirical basis for writing the master thesis

Description of Master Thesis

The thesis topic must correspond with the Internship work and deal with management and the environment. The students formulate the final research question under guidance of a supervisor. The thesis shall have a tight linking between practice, theory and scientific method and follow a critical, analytical approach. Students are expected to follow strict academic standards and ethical norms with respect to data collection, analyses, and reporting.

Learning Outcome

Upon successful completion of the combined Internship and Master Thesis, the student should be able to:

• Demonstrate thorough knowledge on the field of research

• Critically evaluate research performed by others

• Apply relevant scientific theory and methods in studying an academic issue, and independently analyze empirical data

• Carry out independent critical research and scientific stringent reporting based on high ethical standards