Profession-Based Volunteering as Part of the University Curriculum of Law Students

Abstract

This article is motivated by the topicality of the development of professional competencies of bachelor students. Most of the literature concerning volunteering does not focus on the possibility to incorporate volunteering into the university curriculum. In contrast, this article's main goal was to study university students' attitude to "equating" profession-based volunteering for the internship. Following the goal, the authors had the following objectives: having studied the regulatory framework of volunteering, find if it was possible to combine volunteering with an internship as part of the education process and identify the potential of student volunteering. Authors described the regulatory documents governing volunteer activities, analysed the measures to support volunteering in Murmansk region, and identified the specifics of volunteer activity in an educational organisation (MASU) that law students can do in the framework of university departments or student unions. Based on the analysis of the survey results of 102 bachelor students of Murmansk Arctic State University (Murmansk, Russia), the authors concluded that profession-based volunteering is appealing to university students and helps them acquire professional competencies, which made it possible to count volunteering as internship training. Since internship can occur in an educational organisation or an organisation suitable to the competencies the student must develop, an internship in a volunteer organisation is technically possible since such an organisation is also subject to state certification. To assess student internship prospects in volunteer organisations, this option must be legally formalised for volunteering students. We suggest that including that amendment into legislation will help educational strengthen relations between non-governmental organisations and universities.