What IS an Internship for Grad Students?
Whether or not your out-of-school work experience actually was designed to be an internship for grad students is irrelevant. The experience and skills you gain and articulate are super-important. I stress articulation here because the skills you possess (including those from your degree) are invisible until you demonstrate their relevance to your potential employer.
The structure of an internship can vary wildly, but the minimum is that it be a short-term opportunity to learn something related to a career you may be considering, and that you are able to contribute in a work situation. Short-term can mean weeks or months, any time of the year, full-time or part-time, and it can be paid, unpaid or include only living expenses.
Opportunity to Learn
The “opportunity to learn” depends on what experience you want, and what the organization needs and can offer. Usually, it’s not useful to work as a file clerk if you are a Ph.D. student, but even then, if it represents an opportunity to work inside an organization, just to get the feel of it, it could be worthwhile. (Getting the feel of an organization can be enormously important to deciding whether it’s the kind of place you want to spend a lot of time in future.)
Several years ago Sally (not her real name), a Master’s grad in English lit, was considering dropping out and taking a paralegal program. But before she finalized the decision, she was able to find a temp job as a file clerk in a law firm. She later said it was the most worthwhile learning experience she’d had that year, because it helped her decide not to take the paralegal route she was contemplating, but to apply to law school instead!
The internship or temp work experience can be equally important to the organization that has a chance to see a potential hire at work. Organizations that have developed internship programs for undergrads clearly want to “try out” interns to see if they “fit” within the organization, and gauge their ability to adapt and learn quickly. If both parties like what they see, the companies can more fully “groom” these individuals for more permanent positions later.
The stereotype of the undergrad business major in an internship is common because many managers have had internships and understand the situation. But it’s less easy for hiring managers to see how a grad student in literature (or sociology, or environmental health, or nearly anything else) can fit in.
That becomes your job. You’ll need to be able to articulate how your skills in analysis and communication can help the business, perhaps by recognizing and analyzing problems, and communicating possible solutions. Your training as a grad student has given you skills and critical acumen, but you may need the experience working in an organization to understand how you can use them to contribute. When you have done that, you can articulate your value to potential employers.
Opportunity to Gain a New Network
Whether or not you know the general direction you want your career to unfold, you also can use an internship to help extend your network, so you have a ready source for learning more about that career area. The professionals in your organization likely know others working in the same field, but in other organizations, and the personal referrals you receive from one gives you access to others with different information and experience. As you develop these relations, you naturally learn more about the field and the network.
While interning, the network you develop (almost automatically) includes potential mentors and others more experienced in that field than you. But they also learn more about you - your skills and strengths, and based on their perception of you, they can suggest more possibilities that you haven’t noticed. In fact, as a general principle, you should be making an effort to cultivate mentors outside of your academic life, even if you don’t expect to move beyond it later.
Relationships with co-workers always have potential for developing into a long-term network – and, like good investments, they can pay dividends years later. Even relationships built on the strengths of weak ties (such as being alumni of the same school, or having worked at the same company at some time in the past) have the potential to give you information you need, if you are able to ask for it.
Bottom Line
For grad students looking for career paths beyond academia, part of the difficulty is the lack of a wide base of work experience and a broad network. An internship could be the solution to both and more than one exploratory internship could multiply the returns on time invested. And, it just may change our image of the stereotype internship.
© Copyright, 2009, Kate Duttro. All rights reserved. Used with Permission.
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Job-Hunt's Academic Job Search expert Kate Duttro is a career strategist, coach, and instigator. She writes the Career Change for Academics Blog, for current and recovering academics, and other smart cookies. For more than 10 years, she has provided career services at the University of Washington, where she has counseled, taught classes and workshops, and dug out information for thousands of undergrads, grad students, post docs and alumni in all phases of career development. Holding several degrees, including a PhD in anthropology, Kate has also earned many professional certifications in the field of career coaching.
