How Can an Internship Help Your Student? by Ianni Le
Many students enter college unsure about what kind of career they want and the best path to get there. While classes and professors can definitely help you figure this out, I personally found my internships to be the main deciding factor. Students discover what they love through their classes, but there’s nothing like real world experience to clarify what you’re looking for in a job. Internships look great on a resume of course, but they’re also beneficial for academic planning. Whether a student finds an internship within an industry related to their major, or one that gets them outside their comfort zone exploring a new passion, the experience can help them focus on a potential career trajectory — making it easier to tailor their major and take the right classes to reach their goals.
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My internships taught me about myself — and what I need to thrive in a work environment. No two internships are alike because no two companies are alike. As an undergrad, I interned with two start-ups which differed both in their management style and their industry (one was a media company and at the other I worked on in-house branding for a hospitality firm).
Both internships involved a large amount of time running around and shooting photos or video that later needed to be quickly edited and published. I had previously thought this kind of pace was what I wanted — a job that kept me on my toes and demanded a lot from me. While it was certainly exciting — there was something new every hour — I learned that my creativity works best given a little breathing room. Under constant tight time constraints, I would hit slumps causing my work to suffer. As fun as the internships were, I recognized that a long term commitment to this kind of career wasn’t what I was looking for.
