Public Administration Education and Professional Practice in Romania: Exploring Students’ Perceptions

Abstract

During professional practice stages students use the skills and knowledge previously acquired via formal classes, create networks, find mentors, enter into contact with citizens and their problems and obtain much needed professional experience, while simultaneously improving their theoretical knowledge and skills as a result of working side by side with practitioners in host organizations. As such, the main goal of this paper is to provide a general overview of professional practice in Romanian public administration education by looking at the undergraduate students' satisfaction regarding the practicum stage in different host institutions. The data (N = 89) collected from undergraduate students in a public administration program allows us to explore: their satisfaction with different aspects of professional practice (ranging from resources to new knowledge acquired), the strengths and weaknesses of practicum, the perceived utility of such activities and potential improvement measures. Going further than a simple descriptive analysis, our data also shows that the perceived benefits of professional practice can be reduced to two latent classes of utilities/benefits: those related to the new skills and knowledge acquired and the interactions with practitioners and citizens.

Why Some Fail and Others Succeed? Explaining the Academic Performance of PA Undergraduate Students

“…Jayanthi et al 2014;Mlambo 2011;Jansen and Bruinsma 2005;Chen and Lin 2008), thus strengthening the reliability and robustness of the fi ndings. Th e current work continues previous public-administration education research conducted on Romania, focusing on the relationship between universities and their surrounding local environment (see Macarie and Moldovan 2012), extracurricular academic activities, academic performances and the employability of public-administration master students (see Moldovan 2013), the professional practice / short-term internship experiences of students (see Moldovan and Raboca 2019), the development and future of public-administration schools (Hințea 2013) or on the impact universities have on their surroundings (Chircă and Lazăr 2019).…”

Representative bureaucracy and family planning service delivery in Tanzania

“…Representative bureaucracy theory distinguishes between three types of bureaucratic representation: passive representation, active representation, and symbolic representation (Mosher, 1968). Passive representation occurs when bureaucracies share demographic and social characteristics with the population being served (Bishu and Kennedy 2020; Moldovan, 2016; Meier, Kenneth, & Funk, 2017). Active representation, on the other hand, manifests when passive representation results in tangible benefits for represented groups (Dolan, 2002; Meier & Nicholson‐Crotty, 2006).…”

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