Ah, so Interns are paid? OK, that makes more sense now. A lot more.
I can see why there might be advantages to that if you wanted to get involved in particular career, yet wanted to see if it was actually something you could do…
SOME of them are. Not all of them. I did an internship my last semester of college-it was unpaid, but I got course credit for it.
Not necessarily. I did semester-long internships as a school requirement in high school for free. There are still a pretty sizeable number of unpaid internships as well. If you’re in a business like music, radio, journalism, TV, etc., the work experience and the connections (nevermind the work credit) are WELL worth the unpaid work.
We have an intern on my team at work this summer. She is pretty much equal to an entry level employee and does the work of one. She doesn’t photocopy, go get coffee, or make lunch runs. She is given assignments that are important and she performs these tasks as a new employee would. When it’s lunch time and we all decide to head out to a local restaurant, we invite her along as a peer. The only difference in the way that she is treated is that she has some internship program meetings and stuff like that. Hell, she got training that is far better than some of us employees, we were jealous! Much of that stuff we had to figure out on our own.
What she gets out of it is the knowledge of what it feels like to actually work at my company as a real employee. That type of knowledge could be priceless if you’re trying to find your way in the business world.
My first job was essentially a paid internship. About midway through I was switched to a different group from the one I had been working for, so the head of the new group wanted to talk to me first. He asked me about how the last one group was and what I’d been working on and I replied, “I haven’t really been working on anything. I asked a couple of times for them to assign me something, but they didn’t have anything, so mostly I’ve just been sitting at my desk, waiting for someone to assign something.”
So he says back, “Well I don’t have much for you to do either. But the thing you need to learn is that there is always something to be done, just keep your head up and watch and don’t wait to be assigned a task. If you see something you can do, just start doing it.”
Best career advice I ever had.
Being an intern gives you the chance to learn what you are lacking that is not allowing you to do the job, or not to enjoy the job. And your boss (assuming he’s not a complete ass) will probably be able to give you advice on how to fix that if you are honest. Getting that down before you’re at your first real job is quite definitely a good thing.
The last time I worked with interns (co-ops, actually, although I don’t know what the exact difference was), they were treated as full members of the department and had duties commensurate with their abilities. This particular IT department had two full-time employees, a contractor (me) and two or three co-ops or interns at any given time. They wrote code, maintained computers, and did migrations right along side the rest of us. One of them, I admit, wasn’t very good, as I got to know well when I took over one of her projects. On the other hand, the best and brightest of the lot was hired by the company when he graduated. Oh yes, they were paid.
Many years ago, I did an internship in German translation. I got course credit rather than payment and I don’t remember running the copy machine or making coffee. Instead, I worked on actual documents which needed to be translated rather than exercises assigned in class. My work was reviewed by the person assigned to mentor me.
Done badly, I can see how an internship can be a waste of time. On the other hand, my personal experience with interships is that they’re good things for students and benefits. College can teach you a lot of valuable theory, but there are myriad practical things which only come to light when you actually start working in the field.
I worked for a while in a factory that offers internships to local tech high school students. The kids were studying either electricity or mechanics; each got assigned to one of our 5 maintenance guys and got rotated around a bit.
What the kids got:
- to be in a real factory for more than half an hour
- a personal mentor
- a lot of safety training. This was a company that took safety very, very seriously; the specific factory was a company flagship in that regard and intended to stay that way.
- to learn how to drive a forklift (a skill that’s in heavy demand in the area)
- to see what work in a maintenance department is like, what work in a warehousing area is like, and what work in our production area is like
The factory got to have a list of kids that had interned there, which might be interested in upcoming openings in either of the three areas, how well each of them fit, who would fit well with which shift teams.
One thing that’s important is to know which internships are considered “wrapped deals”, like with these kids who still had one year of school to go, and which are seen as “you may get a job offer at the end”. Even in the second case, I prefer to treat any kind of temp job as “limited time” rather than have myself dangling for that possible prize (which may not even be that much of a prize, you get as much of a chance at evaluating the company as the company at evaluating you).
The CEO’s golfing buddies. :rolleyes:
Do you actually have a job or have you just seen them on TV?
I’ve found that most people who have uttered the words, “it’s all politics” are the people who don’t actually understand the difference between good ideas and bad ones and like to have a comforting mantra to fall back on that allows them to maintain the illusion that they have good ideas.
Well probably because the CEO’s golfing buddies are other professionals of similar stature who he knows and trusts and who have been in the industry for years. The intern, as sensible as he/she make think he/she is, has very limited work experience and has a very limited view of the company. If the problem is so simple a kid still in college could come up with the solution, chances are it would have been solved already.
I’ll give you an example. My consulting firm was working with an airline to help them save money on engine parts. The intuitive answer might have been to go with the cheapest parts, right? Wrong. It’s more complex than that. An airline is better off going with the most RELIABLE parts regardless of cost because lost revenue due to airplane downtime cost far more than any parts.
College students coming into the work world often think they know a lot more than they do. One of our interns thinks he should come on board next year at a senior consultant level because he has four years of “real work experience”. All experience isn’t equal and I don’t consider four years of helping fix the network in an 8 million dollar company (IOW, small) to be equivalent to 4 years experience providing consulting services to top corporations working for a half billion dollar consulting firm.
There’s also an art to giving suggestions. My students on internship often will say something like, “You should be doing X, Y, Z,” which is not effective. Often interns don’t know the history of the issue, the larger considerations, or the legal and ethical pieces. And sometimes the politics are important, and I consider learning how to find out about that to be part of the internship, and more broadly, part of learning how not to give offense in a work setting.
Take your contrarian glasses off and go reread my post and the one I was responding to. Then, go piss up a tree. Somebody said they didn’t know what people meant by the phrase, and I told that person what they meant. Go rant at whoever it was who told him it was all politics. It wasn’t me.
What you are supposed to get out of an internship is the opportunity to ask “What do you mean by that?” when someone makes a comment like this.
It appears you let that opportunity slip by.
Nearly every job in my industry (animation) requires a certain level of experience. Internships are a way to get that experience. Plus you also get a good chance, if you’re good, to get a permanent position with the company, as well as connections. I was unable to find an internship within the general timeframe of graduating college, but was heartbreakingly close (I think) to one.
My daughter is interning this summer for a poultry concern here in California.
She has been assigned a project to work on seeing if she can find a way to lower the mortality in turkey chicks.
So far she has made two presentations to management. At the first they were impressed with the scope of what she intended to do. At the second they told her they have a place for her when she graduates. 
So this summer she learns how to:
Find a place to live on her own
Do a project
Learn presentation skills (It’s different when you are in front of senior management)
Network
Get some serious clues about how the real world works.
And they are paying her.
Not a bad deal.