Well, as the name goes, summer internships are the ones that are taken up during the summer break to have a new learning experience. Internships can be the best way to get to know about a particular field, how you need to work, the skills required and they help you get familiar with the corporate or start-up culture, as the case may be. Apart from the usual kind, there are also online or ‘work from home’ internships, that you can do by sitting at home and gain the valuable lessons that an internship teaches you.So if you’re still in a dilemma regarding how an internship can prove to be helpful to you, let me help you out with this by providing the advantages of an internship.
1. Best use of summer breaks:
You get to know about how things are done in a workplace, the behavior and norms to be followed there and keep yourself updated with the corporate culture. Instead of sitting at home aimlessly throughout your summer break, you can do an internship and make your holidays fruitful for yourself. The best thing that you’d learn through an internship is time management, because you have to manage work, family, friends and even some time for yourself, all in a single day. In a nutshell, it’ll be a great learning experience for you.
2. Helps in socialising:
While doing an internship, you get to know and work with so many people, that you’ll get to learn some socialising lessons too. Even if you have really good socializing skills, you’ll see yourself transformed into a pro at socialising with people. This proves to be useful for you in both the short and the long-run, because you need to possess really good communication skills to get into the bigger posts in a company or even to start something of your own. Thus, abiding the fact that you can’t be successful unless you learn how to put forward your ideas infront of people and also the art of convincing people.
3. Helpful in making career decisions:
Internships have proven to be decisive in making career plans. In order to be sure about a particular field, you can do an internship in the same and analyse it as per your skills, interest and future scope. Moreover you get a chance to venture into different fields, which help bring out the best in you. You become aware of the different departments in an office and how they work together as a group. Since, you don’t necessarily need to be of a particular field to get an internship in it. Thus, you may intern at different departments and then decide as to what field suits you the best. Like you may even do an internship based upon your hobbies, like- photography, writing, etc. and thereby be sure regarding what you’d take up as your career.
4. Brushes up your skills:
Internships prove to be very helpful in brushing up your existing skills and adding a few extra too to your personality. It gives you the much needed exposure into the corporate world and helps you develop as an individual. It provides an environment for competition and learning that motivates to enhance yourself and your work, to be the best in your workplace. Being surrounded by other interns, who are of your age, it is a great learning experience from them. Plus, the feedback by your mentors are icing on the cake, to make you fit for a particular field.
5. Useful in job selection:
The Merit Certificates, Letter of Appreciation, Letter of Recommendation and Letter of Excellence that you receive while doing such internships, are very useful during job selections, when you step into the bigger picture. Besides such letters and certificates, the experience that you gain from these internships is very valuable and will help you in the long-run. Since you are more or less familiar with the corporate culture, you won’t face much difficulty in adapting yourself with your workplace and the prevalent norms. Moreover, the management skills that you’ve possessed from such internships are there to last a long time.
So, make the best possible use of your vacations and get enrolled into an internship. Even an unpaid one can give you various non monetary benefits and make you an independent and confident person.
By Shreya Srivastava,
Content Writer – DU Times
