What is the Internship Readiness Common Application?

Aspiring professionals must complete an internship to sit for the Child Life Certification Exam. Individuals are responsible for seeking out and applying to internships of interest. 
ACLP strongly encourages sites to utilize the Internship Readiness Common Application. The application allows candidates to provide demographic and academic information, describe and demonstrate relevant experiences, and demonstrate an understanding of the Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities (KSA).

What are the components of the Internship Readiness Common Application?

The Internship Readiness Common Application is composed of the following three items:
1. In-progress or completed Eligibility Assessment
2. Internship Readiness Common Application Fillable PDF
3. Unofficial transcripts

Can I apply for an internship without starting an eligibility assessment?

No. Prior to completing the Internship Readiness Common Application; applicants must have started their Eligibility Assessment with ACLP.

How to complete the Internship Readiness Common Application Fillable PDF

The fillable PDF is a file downloaded to your computer and MUST BE SAVED to your computer as you complete, edit, and make changes.  Applicants can save their progress at any time.

How to remove identifying information from the application

Please refrain from including any specific identifying information about an institution you worked at in your application. Instead, focus on describing your roles, responsibilities, and achievements in a general manner by using “this institution” or “this organization” in your application to avoid naming a specific hospital or program.

How to submit a completed Internship Readiness Common Application

Applicants are responsible for submitting their completed application (all three components) to each internship site they are applying to. They should also review the specific application requirements for each site. If a site requires one PDF containing all three components, applicants can merge PDF files using an online system.

Should this application be used for practicums as well as internships?

No, this application is only intended for internship use.

While practicums are not currently a requirement for internship, some internship sites prioritize candidates who have completed one. Will there be a way for students to indicate on the application if they have completed a practicum?

Applicants may choose to use a practicum or pre-internship experience as one of their 6 listed relevant experiences on the internship readiness common application.

Should the Internship Readiness Common Application be used in other countries outside of the United States?

Yes, the goal is for the Internship Readiness Common Application to be used everywhere. 

What is considered a healthcare setting?

Experiences within healthcare settings include any environment involving children and families due to medical encounters. Examples include but are not limited to volunteering in a hospital, programs for children with medical diagnoses, child life pre-internship experiences, volunteering at hospice sites, paid work experience in a hospital setting. Please reference the Language Associated with the Internship Readiness Common Application resource for additional definitions.

Is there a minimum number of hours required in each of the two experience categories?

There is not a minimum hours requirement.

Why are applicants limited to 6 experiences?

Having applicants select 6 experiences encourages critical thinking and decision-making, it promotes quality over quantity, it standardizes the application, and it decreases time commitment for reviewers.

Is experience in a hospital required?

Applicants are required to include at least one experience within a healthcare setting in their application.

What happens if a student has more than 6 different experiences working with children

Learners will have to evaluate and prioritize which experiences to highlight within their application and align with the KSAs. Additional experiences can be discussed during the interviews if needed.

Would a practicum be counted as one of the 6 experiences?

Yes

How do I download my Evaluation Report from the Eligibility Assessment?

A print to PDF button has been added to the eligibility assessment page to facilitate the submission of consistent eligibility assessments.

What transcripts need to be included in the application?

All transcripts that evidence your child life coursework progression. Both official/unofficial transcripts are accepted. 

Can you please give an example of how a student can link a specific KSA to their "experience" response.

Applicants are asked to make a choice about which of their experiences are most relevant to the field of child life and how those experiences best showcase the applicant’s growth and development of the KSAs. Critical thinking skills are needed to understand how the KSAs are present or are applied within each hands on or field experience.

Can I submit additional materials with my application?

Unless specifically requested by an internship program, please do not submit any additional materials with your Internship Readiness Common Application. 

What if my practicum did not accrue many hours in a medical setting? Should I still include information about how this experience prepared me for the internship in the application?

The quality of experiences is more valuable than the quantity of hours completed. Consider the meaningful interactions that took place within that time. What was observed of child life staff and how did those professionals build relationships? Focus on finding the most pertinent experiences during the hours spent in a given setting and write about those.

Do not discount or discredit any exposure or experience with young people and families as they all can be valuable. Reflect on all pre-internship experiences, review the Internship Readiness KSAs, and incorporate those experiences into the application. Each experience offers the opportunity for gaining knowledge and perspective. When applicants are able to apply experiences to the child life profession, they are able to showcase their understanding of the child life role in healthcare to internship programs. 

Is it better to focus on healthcare vs non-healthcare experiences?

It is really about what the applicant feels best connects to the knowledge, skills, and abilities for internship readiness. If there was an incredible experience during volunteer work and the applicant feels it demonstrates a personal understanding of DEI or of health disparities, then go for it and use that experience from volunteering.

If an applicant saw something that was relatable to one of the other comprehension skills in the KSAs during a pre-internship experience, then go ahead and pull that in. Applicants can draw from all the different aspects of up to six experiences. Applicants do not have to weigh anything more heavily than another. It is about how an applicant connects observations and interactions to the knowledge, skills, and abilities.

How do I apply the KSAs to the fillable PDF application?

When listing your relevant experiences, be mindful of the connection to the Internship Readiness KSAs. A minimum of two (one involving children within a healthcare setting and one involving children outside of a healthcare setting) are required to complete the written responses. A maximum of six experiences can be highlighted, but are not required.

Additionally, pre-internship experiences support an aspiring professional's growth and development of the Internship Readiness KSAs. Click here to access the Internship Readiness KSA document. 

How to find the status of CLCC required coursework

The courses listed within the application are required to establish eligibility for the Child Life Professional Certification Exam. Click here for coursework details.

Can sites require site specific items for the internship application? (Ie. asking for letters of recommendations or application specific questions?)

The hope and goal is that this application provides enough information for sites to be able to find internship ready candidates from the application as is. The addition of more items has the potential to increase bias and add work for each stakeholder. One consideration is that a site could ask for additional items, such as recommendations, closer to the time of making an offer to an intern to better align with HR processes. Please refer back to the Removal of Application Components Rationale resource. It really speaks to the why behind what was removed from the previous common application, the thinking behind that, and how we sought to remove bias and burden for all stakeholders.

How do we ensure that sites don’t continue to follow their own wishes and needs, continuing to make it tough and inequitable for students?

It will take the entire child life community to begin to make changes. Individual sites still govern their own application and selection process. The hope is that individual sites will begin to hear the positive responses from other sites who have used it and will move toward this model. Additionally, ACLP is asking programs to consider signing the Internship Access & Equity Pledge.

How will an applicant be able to express intentional interest in sites they are applying to throughout their application?

This is something that could be assessed during an interview. The application's purpose is to help sites determine an applicant's internship readiness.

How should we account for courses in progress?

Academic information can be gathered from the Evaluation Report in the Eligibility Assessment and transcript portions of the application. It is up to the internship site to determine if coursework must be completed prior to the start of the internship.

Cover letters and resumes are professional requirements. Why aren’t they required as part of the application?

Written communication will be able to be assessed via the 5 written responses within the application. Information that would typically be included in a resume is accounted for in the Experience Documentation section where six experiences are detailed in a concise and consistent format. This encourages critical thinking on the part of the applicant to assess which six experiences have best prepared them for an internship. Additionally, the skill of writing/developing cover letters and resumes is part of the ACLP Internship Curriculum Modules (Module 14 – Professional Development).

How will rubrics measure quality while eliminating bias and internship sites choosing interns by program “goodness of fit”?

Rubrics help to reduce bias by encouraging an objective review of the materials and reducing the opportunity for a subjective review. Subjectivity increases the chances of bias influencing the evaluation of materials.

Are internship sites allowed to craft programs that are longer than 4 months as part of paid work, but still completing the ACLP internship modules?

Internship sites are allowed to have different models, in contrast to the 4-month model. There are some internships who utilize a part-time 7-month model

Can we allow for internships to be completed at other non-hospital sites with CCLS's on staff?

Yes, as long as the requirements on the Clinical Experience Verification Form are met. 

Will students be able to apply if it does not meet the minimum requirements for internship readiness?

Right now, the application has three tasks that have to be completed and that is the application portion, the upload of the eligibility assessment, and then the upload of the unofficial transcript(s). Beyond that, with the requirements, again, we are putting a lot of control in the applicants hands to look at the KSAs to examine their own preparation and to be able to demonstrate and showcase how all of that's connected to their growth and development in the field of child life. So right now, there's no feature on the online application that would eliminate anyone in terms of the requirements. But this is a process. As you can tell by all the questions that are still rolling in, there are a lot of questions and concerns about the transition. And really what I can tell you is that we continue to be open to receiving feedback, and we are open to making changes to maximize this application.

For endorsed academic programs, what do the students submit instead of the eligibility assessment?

All candidates, including those enrolled in an academic endorsed program, should upload the Evaluation Report in the Eligibility Assessment. The endorsed program letter is no longer required.

How does the academic curriculum connect to internship readiness?

Internship readiness necessitates collaboration and integrity amongst many stakeholders in the child life community. About a third of the work group members were academic child life professionals. They brought their knowledge of child life academic preparation to this project. For example, if you look at the KSA 2.04, it says “Knowledge of child development and how each developmental stage is impacted by illness, stress, and hospitalization.” A student could develop this KSA from their child development and child life courses. Also, the language of the KSAs is realistic for what a student can obtain in an academic setting.  For example, KSA 1.02 says, “awareness of the Child Life Code of Ethics.” This means that the expectation is that an emerging professional has been exposed and familiarized with the Child Life Code of Ethics- not the expectation that they are skilled at applying it in daily practice. Academics have the opportunity to introduce students to the Child Life Code of Ethics by requiring it as a reading or helping them begin to be aware of the principles through ethical scenarios. As a sample to the working group’s conversation, if you look at KSA 1.03, it reads “exposure to how theory and evidence guide child life practice.” During this conversation, we asked ourselves what types of courses or experience would support this development. We discussed the requirement for child development and family systems courses which would provide exposure to theories, and we discussed the requirement of the research course which would expose students to critically reviewing research to use studies as evidence to support practices.

As an academic, I am excited about how I can use the KSAs in my curriculum. I often get asked by students, “Well what do I need to do to get an internship?” To be honest, before, I didn’t have a concrete answer- a general answer of GPA, experience with well children, x number of practicum hours, and the ability to answer questions about child life. The KSAs give students a concrete answer to work towards.  Students now know if I want to be internship ready, these are the knowledge, skills, and abilities that I need to demonstrate in my application.

As an academic, I plan to incorporate it into assignments. For example, during the first few classes of the semester asking students what all they did last summer and saying well let’s look at the KSAs and discuss where that learning fits into internship readiness. Those are a few examples of how the academic curriculum connects to internship readiness.

How should academic programs prepare students for this standard of readiness?

The responsibility of preparing students for Internship Readiness does not solely lie with academic programs. Some Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities (KSAs) will be acquired through experiences obtained outside of academics such as work/volunteer experience. The KSA document should prove a helpful tool for academic programs seeking to best prepare students for an internship experience. 

Are most programs still only considering applicants working towards their masters, or are they open to undergraduates who have received their bachelors?

There are many clinical internship sites that do not require applicants to be Master's prepared. Information regarding degree/affiliation requirements should be clearly stated on an internship program’s website.

Will there be any need for academic professionals to verify or validate any experience hours that are submitted through the learner’s application at any point in the process?

Not currently. As a part of the application students affirm that the information provided is accurate.