About Internships

I recently met a very young girl in my college library who was browsing the library sections with curious eyes and interest. After browsing through all the sections, she approached me with a query regarding internship. She told that she was perusing an undergrad program in finance at our college and was interested in doing an internship in upcoming 2-months break. I couldn’t help her much except giving generic gyan stuff which came to my mind at that time. However, that made me think a little more about internship and its objectives, both academic/professional and the intangibles.

Internship remains a starry place for those who have never done it, and a barren Rann-of-Kutch for those who have. Very few interns come out with a great experience, especially from well established companies which supposedly have a well-structured format for such programs. Also being in HR and having experienced the other side of interns as well, very few interns actually show interest in any sort of learning. All the fizz dies after a week and their attendance drops. Perhaps the most talked about topic within interns is the free lunch provided by the company and the TT table.  

Expectations and the ground reality are always different in any domain, and internship is no exception. The young and energetic are curious to know what actually lies inside an organization and how they can implement some of their learnings there. But most find the environment unsupportive and their so-called ‘mentors’ hardly giving them any time and assigning them low-grade tasks. And this is understandable, mentors don’t have and get any incentives for mentoring interns, apart from perhaps some false sense of superiority and a small bullet in their annual reviews (which is irrelevant to his/her supervisor). HR is useless for interns, as their headache vanishes by giving them induction training and food coupons. So the majority of interns find themselves roaming around TT tables/gyms and breakout areas after two weeks and then at the end of the internship duration, they come up with some ‘project’ which they can submit at the college. Only a mentor who has done some real investment of time and effort in an intern can think about rejecting the project, rest all are more than happy to sign it without a glance.

The area of topic in an internship is another story. Hardly few get some worthy work during an internship, getting it in their specific domain is very rare. Add to that the confidential nature of information on which companies work, it’s just plain risk without any tangible return. Most of the expectations of getting the expected project in the internship dies within first two days.

Let’s consider a fairly reasonable thought experiment. Say you are doing a specialized course and are looking to do a two-month internship in any organization. You would prefer the topic of the internship and the company to be in the same domain of your academic course, but you are flexible with both the parameters considering you don’t have much time left before your two-month break starts. Any event which can have two outcomes has a 50% probability for both outcomes being random, like flipping a coin. Taking this in mind, let’s consider the following. The probability of you getting the internship in your domain is 50% (it can be more if college assists in placement). Considering the favorable outcome that you indeed get an internship in your domain, the probability of getting actual worthy work in your domain is 50% (now this usually is less than 50%, but let’s be optimistic). Let’s say luck favors you and you indeed get worthy work as well. The probability of you getting a decent-to-good mentor is 50% (ask anyone who has done an internship, s/he will say it’s less than 30%). So, at the end of the internship, the probability of any actual tangible-technical learning in your domain is 50%*50%*50% = 12.5%. That’s a ridiculously low probability. These odds must encourage students to change the parameters of the equation itself rather than having false expectations.

So what can be a reasonable expectation from an internship, the odds of which happening is at least 50%? I don’t know. I personally think that Sales as a domain can teach much valuable skills that any other, which become extremely useful in the later part of the career. Everyone sells. Doing an internship in sales can develop practical behavioral learnings in a person which can never be achieved by any classroom training. Facing rejection, criticism and pressure on sales has exponential learning outcomes. You will carry that badge proudly all your life that you have been involved in actual ground work, have been a part of a profit-center. So perhaps instead of trying to find domain-specific technical work in an internship, we can try to find a sales role in that domain. I am sure everyone will welcome sales intern in any domain. Be it the selling of financial products or insurance (even credit cards) of getting new business for the company.

Be it any domain, any work and any company, students do get the chance to be a part of the system. And since they are not actual employees, their stake is very limited compared to what they get exposure to. An internship is the perfect place to fail in an actual environment without having anything to lose. Talk to everyone from all departments, get to know how things work. Observe and get involved in organizational politics. I have seen so many freshers who even after a year in the organization can’t adapt to the system. The academic theory has instilled strong “should-be” expectations of the work place, totally forgetting the “as-is” conditions. Many interns believe that the culture of the company is not so good, but their final placements will happen in companies with good cultures. It takes 3-4 years of working experience in a multitude of organizations to finally accept that there is no such thing as a good culture.

Don’t bother about the name of the company, big or small. Two years down the line you won’t even include that 2 months experience in your CV. Don’t do it to build the CV. Internship experience hardly counts for organizations. But the experience will count a lot for your development and the long journey ahead. Don’t bother about PPOs, they are generally a joke (just check the conversion rates). And smaller organizations generally have more and better work to delegate to willing interns than big organizations. Go ahead, get a flavor of your future.