Point of Internships

[Anonymous]

Internships are also great for exposure to different areas/position within the same field.

[Anonymous]

My engineering student's part-time, year-round (pending contract renewal in December) internship with a leader in the aero/defense sector has him on a team for a major project making what he says are significant contributions (at least the parts he can talk about). Plus he's getting paid.

About 80% of the interns end up getting folded into various projects upon graduation, so I don't think this would be classified as useless.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:At my job they are doing real work. It's great experience!

Same, our interns work hard and also learn about our industry(health care)

[Anonymous]

My kids are in very different fields. Both of them had internship experience that led to published research, and/or an outstanding recommendation, introduction to more than one very important people in the field, and/or a job offer. Their friends have had similar meaningful experiences with internships. A subset of them, mostly engineers, have been paid extremely well and been taken to various conferences during the internship, all expenses paid.
The really good internships can be hard to come by, but every one I have heard of has been better than OP describes

[Anonymous]

On another level, in-person internships get kids out of the house and around other people, give them some structure and purpose, and a chance to learn something. Same can be said for any summer jog or internship experience.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Internships are also great for exposure to different areas/position within the same field.

+1
My DC is being cross-trained within a few different areas of the company she's interning with. Honestly, I've been pretty shocked at how much exposure to senior employees and actual projects she's been given. And this internship was very hard to find this year, especially after having an earlier one cancelled. Just crossing my fingers she receives a return offer.

[Anonymous]

Another benefit of some internships is that if the person is classified as a part-time/on-call person, then the person can be cleared while they are back in school. This often lets them do more interesting work during the following summer.

[Anonymous]

I’m the manager of a rising senior undergrad intern (business major) at a Fortune 500. We have about 100 summer interns in a 10-week corporate program.

It does much more for them than it does for me.

I’m a little burnt out and have been doing it for 5+ years so I probably won’t do it next year.

What they get:

Their first exposure to a white collar, desk job.
An understanding of how different major departments work.
Learning a bunch of industry/corporate acronyms (pmp, saas, etc)
An immediate understanding of how important soft skills and internal politics are.
An understanding of diverse corporate backgrounds and career paths.
The details of a particular department (finance, hr, etc)
A sense of whether or not they’d want to work at the company or in the industry after graduation.

We are a company that doesn’t make an offer at the end of the summer, they have to apply to something open in the spring of graduation. But, they tend to get hired faster than a regular undergraduate.

[Anonymous]

Mine is working in a lab in Germany, doing real research, but this was brokered through his university.

[Anonymous]

A niece got an internship at a company, doing real work in data science, and it turned into a real job once she graduated.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’m the manager of a rising senior undergrad intern (business major) at a Fortune 500. We have about 100 summer interns in a 10-week corporate program.

It does much more for them than it does for me.

I’m a little burnt out and have been doing it for 5+ years so I probably won’t do it next year.

What they get:

Their first exposure to a white collar, desk job.
An understanding of how different major departments work.
Learning a bunch of industry/corporate acronyms (pmp, saas, etc)
An immediate understanding of how important soft skills and internal politics are.
An understanding of diverse corporate backgrounds and career paths.
The details of a particular department (finance, hr, etc)
A sense of whether or not they’d want to work at the company or in the industry after graduation.

We are a company that doesn’t make an offer at the end of the summer, they have to apply to something open in the spring of graduation. But, they tend to get hired faster than a regular undergraduate.

I think you’re confused. OP is saying internships are worthless. You’re saying at your company, the company really doesn’t benefit much from them.

We agree that SOME internships are not really helpful to the company. It is the fact that OTHER internships are incredibly valuable to both employer and student where OP and maybe you seem to disagree.

[Anonymous]

I'm in the investment management business and I love having interns. We have a kid right now who's starting a freshman at Harvard in the fall. The pod that he is in was working on a fairly complex model that involved a number of compartment transitions that had tricky kinetics and it was taking a while to perfect the system model in Excel. This kid set the system up as a system of ordinary differential equations and solved the system in R in 30 minutes. The rest of us looked around each other and all had the same thought: our shelf life is approaching expiry. But then we realized we can learn something new every day, and we have the perfect instructor sitting with us.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm in the investment management business and I love having interns. We have a kid right now who's starting a freshman at Harvard in the fall. The pod that he is in was working on a fairly complex model that involved a number of compartment transitions that had tricky kinetics and it was taking a while to perfect the system model in Excel. This kid set the system up as a system of ordinary differential equations and solved the system in R in 30 minutes. The rest of us looked around each other and all had the same thought: our shelf life is approaching expiry. But then we realized we can learn something new every day, and we have the perfect instructor sitting with us.

I believe this.

Knowledge of statistical tests (and how to program in R) is incredibly valuable in lots of fields. Ditto for math generally and Mathematica.

[Anonymous]

Aside from what they spend their days doing, interns are in the position of being able to listen and observe. You learn a lot about how a business is run that way.

I spent some summers on the reception desk for a Talent agent. I learned SO MUCh. And I went on to have a big career as an agent myself, largely based on what I picked up in these early positions.

You don't walk out of college and then run a company. There's always a hierarchy and a process. Even in medicine.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’m the manager of a rising senior undergrad intern (business major) at a Fortune 500. We have about 100 summer interns in a 10-week corporate program.

It does much more for them than it does for me.

I’m a little burnt out and have been doing it for 5+ years so I probably won’t do it next year.

What they get:

Their first exposure to a white collar, desk job.
An understanding of how different major departments work.
Learning a bunch of industry/corporate acronyms (pmp, saas, etc)
An immediate understanding of how important soft skills and internal politics are.
An understanding of diverse corporate backgrounds and career paths.
The details of a particular department (finance, hr, etc)
A sense of whether or not they’d want to work at the company or in the industry after graduation.

We are a company that doesn’t make an offer at the end of the summer, they have to apply to something open in the spring of graduation. But, they tend to get hired faster than a regular undergraduate.

If you don’t make any offers at the end of summer, why don’t the companies save that money/time/effort of having an intern program and instead redistribute to to full time employees and resources/budgets.