The real challenge of internships
You might be aware of the fact that we have recently welcomed an intern at MarsBased. His name is Emilio Ríos, and he studies at La Salle. He’ll be a Martian for some months.
Even though the general rule of thumb is “get them involved in real work”, truth is most companies employ them to get their dirty work cheaply.
In my previous companies I have seen plenty of these situations: interns spending three to six months resizing images, changing text labels here and there, testing stuff that could be automated using the right tools, debugging Javascript libraries when they don’t even know what Javascript is, reading documentation that hasn’t been updated for ages or writing documentation no one will ever review and will therefore be lost in the shelves of time.
The real challenge is to make their experience unforgettable.
Internships are, in the vast majority of the cases, the first work experience you can have. So why spending it doing worthless stuff?
I, for one, did many internships over the course of my Uni days, and most of them were crappy jobs. Reporting errors found in logs, but never fixing them; reading endless database records to manually check that migration processes ended OK, or even not having EVER to do anything for two months straight. Luckily, enough, I used that time to learn a lot of useful stuff.
I also did an internship at Technische Universität München (Germany), that compensated all the worthless internships done before: good environment, friendly people, state-of-the-art technologies, free-schedule, etc.
Now, that was an internship. And this is how it’s going to be at MarsBased.
In our case, we’re doing this by constantly transmitting our core values: simpler is better, quality over quantity, state-of-the-art technologies and enjoying life at work.
We’re also giving him a project of his own. Emilio is creating stuff. He’s taking decisions. We’re also correcting his mistakes, teaching him the theory so that he can learn by doing. And, hey, sometimes we learn from him as well!
If by the end of his internship he has learned a thing every day, learnt to value quality over quantity and looks forward to working for us or for a company similar to MarsBased, we will have successfully stood up to the challenge.
This post was originally published on Medium on 2015-01-21: The real challenge of internships.
