The Department of Economics allows qualified students to receive academic credit toward their major for experience with businesses, government agencies, or appropriate non-profit organizations. The internship is intended to be a capstone experience in the major where students apply their economic knowledge in the workplace and relate the knowledge and skills they learn in the classroom to the real world.
Qualifications for Enrollment in the Internship Program
Students must (1) be juniors or seniors, (2) be majoring in Applied Economics or Economics, and (3) have at a minimum completed all core and supporting course requirements.
Qualifying Placements
The work experience may be compensated or uncompensated, but it must be relevant to the student’s program of study in economics. The internship is intended as an integral part of the economics major and is not simply a work/study program. To receive academic credit for the internship, students must be given meaningful assignments clearly related to the primary function of the organization with which they are placed. Academic credit cannot be awarded for placements that require principally secretarial or clerical duties; sales, whether retail or financial, or solicitation of sales prospects including “cold calling”; or even professional responsibilities outside the scope of economics.
Course Requirements
No internship placement can be approved without a written statement of your duties and your assigned work hours with the organization. The statement should be written on agency or organization stationary and be signed by your supervisor. The student must submit this document to the Undergraduate Director for approval and must inform the Undergraduate Director as to the number of hours s/he wishes to earn (3 for Economics majors, 3 or 6 for Applied Economics majors) before s/he can be enrolled in the internship program.
After getting the internship approved by the Undergraduate Director, the student will be administratively added to ECO 4941, “Economics Internship.” The course is delivered entirely online so that students may accept internship placements anywhere in the world and simultaneously complete the course requirements.
ECO 4941, Economics Internship: The Economics Internship is an academic course related to the internship experience. Students work at an internship outside the department, and must complete assignments in order to get academic credit for the economics internship. Students are required to submit a weekly description of their internship activities, duties, and responsibilities; to complete a set of assignments; and at the end of the semester, to submit a paper that describes in detail the tasks they performed during the internship and discusses the skills and information required to accomplish each task. Students are expected to work 10 hours per week in the external internship in order to receive 3 credit hours for the economics internship. The course has the core economics courses as prerequisites, because students are expected to use their economics knowledge at their internship, particularly econometrics.
Finding an Internship Placement
Students are responsible for locating their own internship placement and for ensuring that it is a qualifying placement. An important part of the internship experience is for students to locate their own placement opportunity and to make all necessary arrangements. All internships for credit must be approved in advance by the Undergraduate Director. Students should not commit to a placement without prior approval.
The FSU Career Center can often provide assistance to students seeking internships.
Selected Internship Placements of FSU Economics Students
Here is a list of places that economics students have interned. Some of these were by special arrangement or though prior individual contacts that the student had, and are not likely to be available to anyone else, but some of them have been home to more than one student and may even have some kind of formal internship program.
| Summit Financial, Inc. | Tallahassee, FL |
| LINQ Financial Group | Coral Gables, FL |
| Capital City Trust Co. | Tallahassee, FL |
| Advantage One Mortgage Corp. | Maitland, FL |
| Western International Securities | Tallahassee, FL |
| Morgan Stanley | Tallahassee, FL |
| Allied Home Mortgage Capital Corp. | Wakefield, MA |
| Social Security Administration | Port Richey, FL |
| Merrill Lynch | Tallahassee, FL |
| U.S Mission to the European Union | Brussels, Belgium |
| UBS/Pain Webber | Stuart, FL |
| Moya Group Consulting/Lobbying | Tallahassee, FL |
| Economic Development Department | City of Tallahassee |
| Florida Department of Management Services | Tallahassee, FL |
| SunTrust Bank | Tallahassee, FL |
| Florida Workers Compensation Insurance Guaranty Assn. | Tallahassee, FL |
| RMPK Funding | Jupter, FL |
| The Washington Center (organized summer intern program) | Washington, D.C. |
| Mowell Financial Group | Tallahassee, FL |
| SupraTelecom | Tallahassee, FL |
| Bureau of Export Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce | Washington, D.C. |
| Salomon Smith Barney | Washington, D.C. |
| ERS | Tallahassee, FL |
| Florida Department of Administration | Tallahassee, FL |
| Analysis Group | Denver, CO |
| Balmoral Group | Winter Park, FL |
Berkeley Research Group (BRG) has notified the Department of Economics of internship positions for Summer 2025, targeting Class of 2026 students. They are accepting applications at https://careers.thinkbrg.com/search/campus-opportunities/jobs under the “2025 Summer Associate – Economics and Data Analytics” job title.