ECON390-25S2 (C) Semester Two 2025

Internship or Consultancy Project

15 points

Details:
Start Date: Monday, 14 July 2025
End Date: Sunday, 9 November 2025
Withdrawal Dates
Last Day to withdraw from this course:
  • Without financial penalty (full fee refund): Sunday, 27 July 2025
  • Without academic penalty (including no fee refund): Sunday, 28 September 2025

Description

An internship or consultancy project is an opportunity to experience a professional work environment. Internships or projects taken for credit are usually unpaid. You are expected to develop a good understanding of a sector, market or organisation. The work you submit will show an application of the tools, ideas or concepts of economics. You will be required to reflect critically on the requirements of transitioning from an academic to a work environment and the skills valued in a professional workplace. As these are economics placements, priority is given to economics majors.

An internship or consultancy project is an opportunity to gain professional-level educational or training workplace experience while earning academic credit. The purpose of ECON/FINC 390 is to integrate academic and experiential learning through the use of projects and off-campus internships. This course is designed for educational purposes only. Students will have no expectation of reward and will not be employed by the host organisation or the University, although this may be organised by special arrangement. During the course of your consultancy project or internship, you are expected to apply the knowledge and academic skills you have learnt from your university studies in economics or finance to analyse and better understand a sector, market or organisation. You will also be required to use your academic knowledge and skills to reflect critically on the requirements of transitioning from an academic environment to a work environment and the skills valued in a professional workplace. As these are economics or finance placements, priority is given to economics and finance majors.

Learning Outcomes

  • The aims and objectives of this course are:

  • Demonstrate an understanding of the selected sector, market, organisation or industry.
  • Describe and analyse behaviours and norms as are expected in a professional work environment and reflect critically on these as personal attributes.
  • Analyse their experience and observation using the ideas, tools and concepts of economics or finance.
    • University Graduate Attributes

      This course will provide students with an opportunity to develop the Graduate Attributes specified below:

      Critically competent in a core academic discipline of their award

      Students know and can critically evaluate and, where applicable, apply this knowledge to topics/issues within their majoring subject.

      Employable, innovative and enterprising

      Students will develop key skills and attributes sought by employers that can be used in a range of applications.

      Engaged with the community

      Students will have observed and understood a culture within a community by reflecting on their own performance and experiences within that community.

Prerequisites

(1) ECON207 or ECON208; and (2) Subject to the Head of Department approval

Restrictions

FINC390, ARTS395, PACE395

Course Coordinator

Laura Meriluoto

Assessment

This is a pass/fail course. To pass the course, each assignment needs to be passed. If your work is not acceptable, I will send it back to you with comments on how to improve it. Further information on the assessments is available in this course outline and on Learn, and all the assessments are submitted on Learn.

Assessment in Te Reo Māori
In recognising that Te Reo Māori is an official language of New Zealand, the University provides for students who may wish to use the Te Reo Māori in their assessment. If you intend to submit your work in Te Reo Māori you are required to do the following:

Read the Assessment in Te Reo Māori Policy and ensure that you meet the conditions set out in the policy. This includes, but is not limited to, informing the Course Coordinator 1) no later than 10 working days after the commencement of the course that you wish to use Te Reo Māori and 2) at least 15 working days before each assessment due date that you wish to use Te Reo Māori.

Textbooks / Resources

Project Dependent

Notes

To enrol in this class, you will have to be accepted into a project by the course administrator. Available projects vary from semester to semester and students will be invited to apply for projects a few weeks before the start of each semester via the ECON-FINC learn page and the email associated with that page. If you do not have access to the ECON-FINC learn page, please email the course administrator.

It is important to note that there is no guarantee you will be selected for a project as the demand for projects often exceeds the supply of projects. Typically, only about half of the students who apply will get a project. When we allocate students to projects, we take into account the following:

• GPA. It is rare for students with a GPA of less than 5 to get a project. If your GPA is not a good indicator of your performance at university, please contact the course administrator.  
• Motivation paragraph (part of the application process)
• Fit between courses taken and what the project needs
• Complementarity between different team members (ideally skills of different team members are complementary)
• How close students are to graduation.


Note that you should NOT enrol in this class until you have been allocated a project. If needed, enrol in another class until you get a project confirmed.

Indicative Fees

Domestic fee $946.00

International fee $4,363.00

* All fees are inclusive of NZ GST or any equivalent overseas tax, and do not include any programme level discount or additional course-related expenses.

For further information see Department of Economics and Finance .

All ECON390 Occurrences