Almost all of the time, we are told that internships will be a great learning experience. After all, they help us get some real hands-on experience with our future careers. We are even told that an internship does not mean getting coffee for other employees (believe me, you WILL do that once one way or the other). A lot of the time, people who intern will agree that they had an internship that prepared them for their field. For some others, they would disagree with that.
There are times when you may have an internship and it truly does not live up to your expectations. While we are students in college and should be happy for getting an internship with any big company in our career fields, this does not mean that it will actually be what you hope for when first applying. To be honest, it sucks when an internship does not give you more insight into your career.
However, even when an internship is bad, it still gives you a valuable learning experience.
I know, crazy right? An internship that was not beneficial is still beneficial to you. I would say that a bad internship can be beneficial to you in two ways: expanding your professional network and learning what you DO want to do in your field.
I have two internships under my belt and while I found one to be good, I found the other one to be not bad, but not immensely great either. However, I still appreciated the latter one because it allowed me to expand my professional network and learn what I do want to do for my future career.
The most important thing to learn is that even in a bad internship, you still have the opportunity to make more connections to other professionals in your field. At one of my internships, I got to do some small social media projects for clients, but nothing too big. While I was not expecting to get a massive project, I also hoped I would be doing a little more for clients. However, I decided to make use of working with a client to meet more people there and develop my network. In making use of my internship’s connections, I was able to connect to more professionals in my field, something that will pay off in the long run!
Internships can also help you confirm what and where you do want to work in the future. The place that I work at is a bit of a smaller company. There will be days when I have stuff to do and other days where I am literally twiddling my thumbs playing Pokémon GO. I did not like having nothing to do because of an uneven workload. That made me realize that I want to work in a bigger place, somewhere that would give me a constant stream of interesting work and more opportunities to take on more projects.
So yeah, internships can be bad and not let you grow as a professional. However, it is even in a bad professional experience that we learn what we really want to do with our future careers.
