Opportunities and Challenges in an Internship

Note: After reading this article, you may give up a number of beliefs and form new ones. Do not worry, that is natural.

You, as a student, have a lot to learn from your classroom. But, the practical and real-world application of your classroom study has an equally important role in shaping you for your desired profession. That is exactly where the idea of ‘internship’ arises, and youngsters like you look for an internship opportunity in areas of their interest or are at least suggested to do so. Are you a high school or a college graduate looking for a way to learn the where, what, when, and how about the use of your education? You could even be a current student in high school or college in a term break looking for some fruitful investment of your leisure. In these scenarios or any other, your interest in an internship is genuine and your interest in learning needs an appreciation.

Whatever be the reason that dragged you to the stance that you need an internship, you may not have had a clear picture about what lies ahead. Undoubtedly, great opportunities lie in internship and so do the challenges. Here is a peek into those opportunities and challenges to help you take right decisions regarding internship and make the most out of it.

Opportunities

Identification and test of interests and abilities

Youngsters are curious by nature. So, you might generate untested interests and sometimes even those which have no relation to your academic background. For instance, a college student majoring in mass communication may be interested in working as a journalist. Interning in a newspaper can be helpful to such students in testing their interest and ability in the field.

Imagining a different scenario, it is not a matter of surprise that you could be a high school science student interested in journalism. An internship in a newspaper can help you understand whether you are really interested in journalism. The student’s line of interest can be clear after working for a few months. It cannot be denied that those interests turn out to be pseudo-interests or whim in a number of cases.

Identifying your interests and abilities can play a significant role in your career and the best way is putting them to test. Could it not be an internship?

Learning outside the classroom

Out-of-classroom knowledge is the best part of the internship. Generally, working is applying the education you have gained. So, classroom education is always incomplete unless the students apply whatever they learn. A student of Information Technology (IT) is taught a number of codes in the classroom, which are meaningless unless the student uses the codes in developing software. Schools and classrooms may keep practical classes, but they can never be as real as an internship in an IT firm. In that scenario, the IT student can learn in a professional environment with constant use of knowledge gained in the classroom.

Specializing

You certainly have a number of concepts in your mind, either they are from the broad high school classes or from the focused and narrowed college classes. In professional life, you are not going to use the whole set of things you learned. Similarly, you may have to do a few things you were never taught. An internship can help you narrow down the broadness (actually the vagueness) of your knowledge in order to specialize in a certain field. If we again assume you to be an IT student, we can be certain that you learned a range of things from programming to designing. If you intern as a graphics designer (this could differ as per your interests), you will concentrate your efforts in that field. This is called specialization and is very much necessary in professional life. All forms of education may not be specific enough to make the students fit a single profession, leaving a gap between education and profession. The internship can help you fill that gap.

Understanding the working of a business

Now here comes the clever part. The best way to know how a business works are to be in it. This might seem quite selfish, but that is pretty much the idea, isn’t it? Internship in a business firm can help you a lot in understanding how the business functions, including what the model of revenue generation is, how the business produces and distributes its goods and services, and how the market consumes them. As an intern, you will be a follower who will work for others, but at the same time, you will be a person who is learning to be a leader. So, the internship can be a way of learning about a business in order to be better at it or even to start one of your own. You do not want to work for someone else for the whole of your life, do you?

Building networks

Porter Gale has correctly said: Your network is your net worth. If you join an office or a business, you will get to know a lot of colleagues and seniors who will be working in the same field in the long run. These links can be useful to you throughout your career, even after the internship. Why not imagine a scenario of collaborating with your fellow interns in the long run? So, an internship can be a way of knowing the players of an industry and how they play. Do not be an intern who does everything the boss says before returning home and nothing else. Interact with your colleagues and seniors. Interaction and networking help learning.

Building your CV

Even a short-term experience is not going to be unworthy in your life. If you have prior experience of an internship in a related field, you will surely be prioritized compared to those who do not have such experience. If your performance in the internship is excellent, you can even get a job placement in the same firm. Internships can help you build an impressive Curriculum Vitae (CV) that is going to make your more practical, preferable, and job-compatible than your contemporaries. Nobody wants to employ a know-nothing.

Challenges and their solutions

Pressure

You are young and might have been depending on your parents for making a living. Since you have no knowledge of what professional life is like, it can be difficult for you to cope with the environment of the place where you do your internship. Professionals are usually adults who have spent years and grown in the environment they are currently in. So they can handle the pressure of work they face in their works. But, you, as a beginning intern, may face trouble managing things. You need to be calm enough to handle the stress such that it does not harm your performance.

Another thing to consider that interns are usually given the tasks that can be time-consuming which require less expertise. In such a situation, you may be under stress to work for long hours.

However, this challenge can be overcome as you learn to cope along with the passage of time. You should look for simplification of the task that has been given to you. If you take this challenging pressure with optimism, you can learn a great art of problem-solving.  Problem-solving is important for people in every profession.

Companies’ perspectives on internship

Your performance as an intern is directly going to be influenced by how the company you work in views internship. Companies do have the aim of providing practical experience to the students via internships, but one thing that we should not forget is the secondary aim or motive of the companies—human resource generation. Even though less skilled, companies do receive a kind of human resource advantage via internships. It would be wise of you to do proper research on how the place (i.e. the company) you are going to apply for the internship has been functioning, how it has been treating interns, and what you can gain from them. There can even be companies which rely much upon interns for human resources. In such cases, the interns are obvious to receive a lot of work pressure.

Managing your expense

When you do certain work, you are always going to need a budget—unless the work is nothing. If you are thinking about working as an intern, you are going to have money spent in professional aspects like traveling and communicating for the office as well as in personal aspects like meals. So, the source of that money which you will use throughout your internship is something that you need to consider before starting your internship. There are generally two types of internships: paid and unpaid. If you are joining an unpaid internship, it is going to be a challenge for you to manage your expenses while working for the company—unless you are supported by your parents or other guardians. So, it is wiser to join internships that pay you, even if in a small scale. At least, you will not have to take the financial burden.

You should also be conscious about the Labor Laws in your country. Labor Laws in most of the countries do not allow companies to keep unpaid interns (Nepalese Labor Law is an example).

Harassment

Young interns are vulnerable to harassment and bullying. Since interns naturally have a low profile in the workplace, other seniors and bosses can manipulate them for either professional or personal purposes. Interns may be harassed (i.e given negative comments that lower self-esteem) by their bosses when their work is not satisfactory. There have even been the cases of sexual harassments to interns. So, you need to be aware of where you are interning and what sort of people the place has. Intern in the place where you will be respected and supported. Always look for feedback from the community that is informed about the company you are planning to intern in. Harassments can hamper people’s psychology in the long run. So, it is always wise to keep yourself safe. However, not all companies have harassers. Choosing to intern in a right place at a right time around right people can help make your career strong.

So, you have learned about the opportunities, challenges, and ways to overcome them in this article. Apply for the internship of your choice, but do remember the theory here: do enough research. Success is waiting for you.