Improving graduate competencies through field attachments: Experiences from the School of Agricultural Sciences, Makerere University

The demand for skilled university graduates to address practical development challenges is higher today than ever before. Field attachment is one of the main approaches for integrating competence building into academic programmes in many universities. While this practice has been going on in Makerere University for a long time, little is understand about the students own perception of the program and thus its effectiveness. To get insights into the students own perspective of the program, a review of 150 student field attachment reports submitted in the five undergraduate programs of the School of Agricultural Sciences, Makerere University for the years 2011, 2012 and 2013 was undertaken. The aim of the study was to establish the impact of the field attachment on students from their own reported experiences and its implications for university-community engagement. Students report of benefiting in terms of practically acquiring technical as well as soft skills. However, there is still low acquisition of entrepreneurial and marketing skills especially among the ‘hard science’ programmes. As lessons, being practically skilled, creative and a team player stand out as desired attributes for effective work in the field. For the amount of activities the students are exposed to, the duration of the internship is too short for meaningful skills acquisition. There is need to review the internship period as well as strengthening supervision in order to enhance skills acquisition and networking as a way of influencing development of long-term university-community engagement.