Interning
I recently had the opportunity to intern physically for the first time after the pandemic. It was a great experience, and gave me many insights into why interning is important and possibly how to take the most out of the opportunity.
Why is Interning important?
We all know that the usual argument for why interning is important is that it gives you practical exposure. When you intern in a professional setting, you see how what you’ve studied in classrooms plays out in real life. There is a distinct joy in being able to identify and solve real world problems using knowledge you learnt in classrooms. But the first thing you learn while doing it is that such scholastic knowledge is not sufficient to solve such problems. It is more like a starting point. Therefore the reason why interning is also important is so that you can deploy the information you’ve learnt in classrooms into action. Such deployment forces you to think. And that’s in my opinion the most important aspect of interning. It is only when you think about concepts while applying them to real problems that you’re able to understand the gaps in your own understanding. Such thinking also helps you to streamline the logic chain. I love it when I’m able to develop tests and analytical trees for any concept. It makes my thinking crystal clear.
For me the most valuable aspect of interning is not working on real world problems. It is learning how to think about issues. and you can only do when you observe a practitioner in action. In my recent internship, I worked closely with people who have been in the workforce from anywhere between 2-20 years. The value of interacting with professionals and learning how they think about issues is invaluable. I think of classroom learning as only acquiring distinct, discrete points of knowledge. What really completes the picture and connects the dots is working on any real world problem that involves these concepts. One of the things I’ve noticed is that a lot of classroom learning is learning concepts in isolation to each other. But if you work on any real world problem in that area, you’ll realize that to be able to solve it you’ll have to think of many of these concepts not only at the same time, but also in relation to each other. I think that unifying function of internships is the real value gain. This idea is famously illustrated by the following image.
Another indicator of the discrete nature of classroom nature is exemplified by the fact that the questions that involve application of a couple of concepts are usually those ‘hard’ questions in Olympiads and not usual classroom learning. I firmly believe that those disciplines that are industry facing (such as engineering, law, finance etc.) should adopt a problem solving approach to learning. What I mean is succinctly explained by Ashish Kulkarni when he said that learning should be backwards i.e. you start by having a problem in front of you and then work backwards to learn concepts you need to solve it. Such an approach is better because not only does it involve learning the concepts as is, it also involves application of those concepts simultaneously. Even if such a model is too difficult for adoption, an easier model that is adopted by some professors is to give practical examples to their students to apply the concepts. However there is one fundamental problem with these ‘practical examples’. They’re actually not practical. You’ll never encounter a problem as simple as those you solve as part of practical application of knowledge. That is not to say that such an exercise is not important. It is. But it is not sufficient. And if one of the outcomes that colleges seek to achieve is to prepare their students for the workforce - they must give their students a problem as complex as exists in actual industrial scenarios. Of course, the expectation from students cannot be to perform as if they were working professionals; the aim of such an exercise is to force students to think like professionals. And as long as any such exercise accomplishes this in any measure, I think it is successful. I know of one professor who gives out an assignment to his students that they would have to do if they were lawyers in that specific industry. It is a particularly hard problem to solve. I’ve seen my friends struggle and toil to solve it. But irrespective of the scores, now they’re better off than almost all those students who have studied that subject sans this exercise.
Ashish has written a couple of good posts on internships and what you should expect and do at them. All of them are worth checking out and following. I think the one practice I’ve started to consistently do now is to make sure I list all the matters I have worked on, and what I learnt from them. You need to be able to really know what you actually did while interning.
I’ve also realized that the only outcome that should matter out of internships is what you learnt. As long as the answer to if you learnt anything new or better during the internship is a yes, it is a successful internship. Experience and learning is transposable. Which is to say that even if you work really hard for any particular place and they don’t say - hire you, that very experience makes you valuable to many other employers. So even if one were to look at the value of internships regarding employment, the worse case of not being able to convert your internship to a full time offer is still a positive sum game since the learning and experience increases your value to other potential employers.
Of course another very important part of internships is that they help you make connections in the industry you’re interested to work in. In that regards, a cardinal rule of networking (I hate to use that word) is that you get ahead in life by winning people’s good faith. And one of the best ways to do that is to just do good work. To show to others that you’re a valuable and reliable resource. If you do good work for any senior, they are more likely to remember you for the good work that you did. And even if they aren’t able to give you an offer, they are likely to connect you to other people who are looking to hire.
So, first - become outcome independent in your internships to be able to maximize your experience. Second, focus on learning new things. Third, talk to as many people as you can and gather as many experiences and insights. And fourth and most important, have fun while you’re at it :)