CPT is curricular practical training and it is the process by which international (F1/J1) students can work off campus.
...
INF 288T and INF 388T are available through the iSchool (not UEX) only for the exceedingly rare situations in which students need to make up a full-time enrollment (rare because not needed in last semester and internship courses don't count towards graduation, so three regular courses plus INF 188T is the usual approach).
Individual Studies INF x81 are the very rare third option. See bottom of page for more detailed discussion, but summary is: when an individual study happens to require work, and work requires CPT, then students don't have to take an additional internship course.
2. Certify that the work relates to the major
...
The MOU with UEX is here: https://utexas.box.com/s/yoo0vu3xc30pvnzmrte1opqyvneli05b (Although there is a signed copy that the Assistant Dean should have, it was on their email).
Individual Studies
This can be a source of tension. Below is an email sent out by James in April 2020.
For Faculty/Staff in reference to CPT.
A reminder that international students may approach you to sign off on an individual study for their CPT/internship. They want this because then they can count this towards their degree, whereas the Internship course cannot be counted.
My advice is to decline these requests, and point students to this page:
https://ischool.utexas.edu/curricular_practical_training
Policy is that individual studies are only used for CPT very rarely when the internship is part of the work of the individual study. The idea is that an individual study project has to be equivalent in academic work to a regular X credit course, to justify counting towards the degree. If that's the case, and an internship is part of that academic project, then we don't also require the internship course for CPT. An example would be an ethnography of a workplace (advised by the faculty running the individual study), or studying with a specific expert at a company (and producing a research paper for peer review where the individual study faculty member is an author on the paper). Hard to see what the academic content of a straight internship would be, though.
Of course the actual content of individual studies are entirely up to individual faculty. In fact no one but the instructor needs to sign off on an individual study. But, as I see it, signing one commits you to providing time and structure equivalent to a regular course.
Consider that there is an equity issue if some students, usually known well by a faculty member, get to do a "zero additional content" individual study around their CPT internship, while others (usually not well known enough or hesitant to ask) are required to do the internship course (and thus pay more overall as they have to do 10 credits that semester).