My recent website CreativeInternships.com has sparked some great conversations along the subject of whether they really are a good experience. As a student I was required to do three full-time internships for an entire semester each. In my situation I can say that each of the positions offered me something that positively influenced my career. I definitely learned aspects of the design industry and printing that I would have otherwise never learned in the classroom. On top of the things I learned, the experience gained was one of the largest factors that set me apart from other applicants when I ultimately went looking for a job after school.
How Were Your Internship Experiences?
I however have been part of a discussion lately with another design professional that has questioned whether internships are such a great thing. Everyone knows that there are positions out there that only make you fetch the boss’s dry cleaning and scan negatives for hours at a time. I however always thought that for the most part these positions were in the minority rather than the majority. I also believe that a good internship is a great way to gain experience while avoiding the dangers of spec.
Now as an employer I am responsible for managing an intern. While our intern may not be able to do the most glamorous work all of the time we still allow him to be creative and develop his skills on projects. Unfortunately experience is a factor, and not all projects are feasible for the intern to participate in and still deliver a product of the highest possible quality. This is not to say that we don’t let him participate. Internships are ultimately a learning experience and playing a role in a project should be a learning experience even if the intern does not get to participate all the way from conception to completion.
Trying to gain perspective
So my question to you is if you participated in an internship position while in school was it a positive experience, and if given the opportunity to do it again would you? Also, if your position was a negative experience, what would you look out for to help students avoid going through what you did?
Update: The amount of comments I have received are not quite what I expected so I wanted to pose this question as well. If you never have participated in an internship, what is your opinion of them, what do you think a position needs in order to be successful?
I am asking for your help so that I can make a difference, you comments will help me define some listing criteria for CreativeInternships.com. This will help ensure that Creative Internships is a place that fosters positive internship experiences.
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June 6th, 2008 at 5:07 am
I’m still a student in college and I have multiple friends that have had amazing internship opportunities. As for myself, I was lucky enough to get a nice paying job close to my field so I don’t have to worry about hunting for internships.
I’ve heard only great things from my friends about their time spent as interns. The term may sound derogatory but in the right business settings and companies the students really are pushed and excited about learning new things. I think that they are almost essential to college because a classroom can only teach you so much. There is a point when you have to break free from the theory, rules, and books that you’ve been learning and apply it in a different setting.
As for the whole “fetching dry-cleaning” situation, I agree that this is a minority and that most professionals would not use interns for their personal objective. With that said, there may be times when an intern has to do a few things that are outside of their job description, but don’t we all have to do that from time to time?
June 6th, 2008 at 6:31 am
Jacob,
I am glad to hear from you that the majority of your peers are finding their internship experiences to be positive ones. I agree that everyone has to do something outside of their job descriptions some time. This is especially true in small companies where employees must fill many hats. I personally do not believe this to be a bad thing, because in most situations those are the situations where I walk away learning the most (fetching coffee/dry cleaning would not fall into this category).
June 8th, 2008 at 9:22 am
My two internship experiences were good ones (18+ years ago). Each one was different. One as in-house and one with a design firm. Both gave me enough freedom to be creative. From these experiences I found that I much rather work in-house than in a design firm. Without this type of experience I wouldn’t really have known which to target for a position when I finished school. Both environments are completely different from the other.
Internships are an important experience for creative students just like it is with other students in other industries such as Medicine, Engineering, Accounting, Legal, and etc.
I think it is an excellent idea establishing criteria for good internship experiences for creative students. When students (and employers) are empowered with the knowledge of what a good internship is all about they then will reap the rewards of such internship experiences.
June 9th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
I held two internships in college: one in design and one in software development. Although I loathe development and have moved my career in an area of design far away from software development, the development internship was far superior.
Both internships were structured much the same. I was placed on a team of professionals and I performed production-level tasks on many, many projects. I was also given an individual project, which I was to complete by myself over the course of the internship. At the end of the internship, I presented my individual project to the team.
The only difference between the two internships was that the software development team involved me in discussion at all stages of the project lifecycle. This allowed me to see exactly where I fit in to the larger picture – the team, the division, the company, and the industry.
After graduation, I took another internship with a print-based branding/marketing company. They left me just as much in the dark as my previous design internship. The chain of command precluded getting any insight into the marketing/branding process. I designed blind and followed orders.
I’m wondering what it is about the design industry that creates such environments?
Certainly it isn’t the workload – I was just as swamped at my software development internship as I am now as a senior designer. But my current company tries to be as transparent as possible. Almost everyone is involved in (or at least privy to) marketing, branding, copy writing decisions. This all makes me think that there are simply too many design professionals out there who take cues from the magician’s guild – share your secrets and you’r e out!
June 9th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Pardon,
I agree that being as transparent as possible is always a good idea. The more you know about how an organization functions the more you are able to see how the overall picture works and thus learn more about the industry in general. Thanks for the great comment, I have not even thought of that,
June 9th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
I was one of those that never got a chance to do an internship. I unfortunately had to work 40 hrs a week while in school. No big deal..not a sob story. One thing that frustrated me about internship opportunities at my school was the fact they were only offered to students in their last semester. It was like the school was telling the rest of us we weren’t worthy. When in fact a handful of us were turning in superior work to upper level students. This may only have been my schools way of trying to get students closest to the job market a potential job but i think it was handled rather unfairly. If a school such as mine requires portfolio reviews each semester and ranks their students i think anyone regardless of completion status in the program should be able to gain the upper hand by partaking in an internship.
June 10th, 2008 at 6:17 am
Joshua, I think that is really weird that your school would only offer their resources to final semester students, I have never heard of that before. In your situation maybe finding an outside internship was not a possibility due to your need to work but that is what I would suggest to someone in your school. There is no reason you can’t take a position without using your schools resources. Even if you did not receive credit for it you probably would get paid and the experience and resume building would definitely be a good thing.