Students’ Speak: 7 must-know reasons to take up internships in college

By: Shrikant Jha

Internships are often overlooked by students who are eager to jump into full-time jobs. However, Shrikant Jha in this article explains the various benefits of pursuing internships and handling live projects during the tenure of your course.

Besides your college curriculum, internships also play an important role to strengthen your resume and career. We’ll discuss various point of views about pursuing internships.

Why do we need an internship?

Do we really need to have internship experience to get placed in a job? No. But it is a very important addition in your overall profile. It will help you in the following ways:

1. Getting your resume shortlisted
2. Giving you an advantage over other candidates
3. Gain hands-on experience of the actual workflow managed at the industry level

How an internship can help boost your career?

Let’s discuss about how internships can help you mold your career in a desirable way:

1. Applying classroom knowledge: In the Indian education system, providing students exposure to industry-level knowledge through course curriculum is still in its nascent stages. Only some lab work and practical assessments which just suffice to improve your overall grades. In an internship, you actually work in an operational environment and apply your knowledge to solve real-world problems.
2. Good Network: A solid professional network is always required to boost your career progress. A good network can give you good guidance plus referrals. Internships are great opportunity to build a professional network very early on in your career.
3. Resume: Internships act as a lightning bolt in your resume. If you have a strong command over the core subjects along with good hands-on experience, you will definitely stand out from the crowd.
4. Professionalism: In the corporate world, there is plenty of incentives on offer while you don’t always find the deserving candidates claiming them. During your internship, you learn about the work culture, ethics of a company, workspace environment along with internal politics and work pressure, something that sounds negative but is an inevitable aspect of corporate work-culture.
5. Learning opportunity: If you want to really build something that contributes to a project as a team member or even a team leader then internships can provide you the platform to demonstrate your skills. In fact, even during an internship, companies expect you to posses some practical knowledge of technologies and prior project experience.
6. Learn from others: It is always preferred to learn from the professionals who are working with emerging technologies and have dealt previously with enterprise-level challenges. You can also gain a lot of fresh insight by interacting with other interns in your project.
7. Gain experience: Most companies want to minimise the effort required in training new recruits. Preference will always be given to candidates with some prior industry work experience. The experience not only counts in terms of domain knowledge but a professional attitude towards work also.
8. PPO (Pre-placement offer): Many companies give you PPO based on your performance. That’s one of the best things about internships. It can be the perfect foundation for building your professional career.

When doing an internship isn’t recommended?

It is absolutely fine to not pursue any internship. The choice before you is always subjective in nature and depends on what your future goals are and how an internship can help you get a step closer to that. Here are some instances for you to avoid internships:

1. When you are preparing for some competitive exams such as GATE, IES or something else. You can always take a break.
2. When the internship isn’t of your interest. For example, if you are from technical background then doing a non-technical internship isn’t a wise choice in terms of gaining relevant experience.
3. When it is totally unpaid. I mean you should be paid basic travel expenses or some perks. However, the choice entirely remains with your basis value gained from the internship.

Projects

An important aspect of your learning is working on diverse projects. Let’s know why project experience is so vital:

1. Even before joining some internship, you need some good project experience on your resume to impress the interviewer
2. Projects can be hobby projects or can be competitive ones like the Hackathons
3. Work towards building a utility project such as a calculator or todo list. It should add some weight to your resume. Interviewers usually like to go at length discussing your projects during the final round.
4. Be thorough about the details in your project. You should have knowledge of all the modules that were used during the project.
5. No need to bluff. Copy and pasting projects won't go very far and hamper your overall knowledge. Even if you are taking references from previously done projects, try to understand the concepts and project workflow.

I hope that now you have some idea about how projects and internships can play a vital role in our careers. Go ahead, build some projects and grab a good internship.

About the Author:

Shrikant Jha is an experienced developer and an Open-Source enthusiast.  He is currently pursuing B.Tech from Galgotias University and hails from Agra. He has always been passionate about hackathons and competitive coding. In his leisure time, he loves to read mythological books and practice yoga.