Beyond the Classroom and into the World: How Students Experience Intercultural Shifts through International Internships

Abstract

As higher education institutions increasingly promote international internships as transformative experiences, questions remain about how participants themselves understand their intercultural learning and development. This qualitatively driven mixed-methods study examines undergraduate business students’ perceived shifts in interculturality following eight-week international internship programs in Barcelona, Dublin, and London administered by a college of business at a large public research university in the southwestern United States. Guided by a critical cosmopolitan framework that integrates interculturality, experiential learning, critical pedagogical perspectives, and decolonial perspectives, the study situates students’ reflections within broader debates about education abroad, power, and privilege. The primary data source is an open-ended post-program survey item in which 53 students identified three personal or professional goals they believe they achieved during their time abroad; these written responses were analyzed thematically to trace personal, relational, cognitive, and behavioral shifts in students’ interculturality, complemented by quantitative data from three Likert-type scales measuring global awareness, comfort in cross-cultural situations, and intercultural competence. Findings indicate that students most frequently described gains in global knowledge, broadened perspectives, personal growth, cross-cultural relationships, and applied skills in international professional settings, alongside persistent tensions between deeper critical insights and more surface-level, mobility-focused accounts of going abroad. The study argues that international internships hold meaningful potential for intercultural learning but do not automatically foster critical, justice-oriented interculturality, and it offers implications for designing education abroad curricula, assessment, and reflective practices that more intentionally move intercultural learning beyond the classroom.