Do you think that your career management starts with your job? No, you are completely wrong. It rather starts with choosing your subject for studies and then continues throughout your student and job life. During student life, your career management can be hidden in organizing and attending workshops/seminars, participating in co-curricular activities, volunteering and doing internships because all these activities help you out for building contacts list, improve your communication skills and build up professionalism in you.
When students are engaged in learning theoretical aspects of their degree, they are also supposed to do internship for learning practical aspects. Actually practical world is far different from theory world that is why universities make it compulsory for getting degree but unfortunately, some common misunderstandings have been developed about it, which we are listing here:
What you Are Supposed To Learn
Apart of various other tools, internships are the best way of learning professional attitude, office politics, handling sub-ordinates etc. Generally, we have misconception that we do internship to learn office work. Why is it misconception? Because every organization has its own sets of procedure and it is not guaranteed that you would be offered job from the same organization where you did your internship. You do not learn WORK. You learn how & should do work. Then what should be the right concept? The right concept of internship is, "It teaches you about professionalism and work environment." not the specific office work procedures or ERPs because every organization has its own way of getting work done.
You Are Not An Executive
The second wrong thought of internees are, they feel themselves as executives or as officers because of the degree which, they are about to have. They mind when assigned relatively low or peon- typed work. Remember! You are internee because you are suppose to learn from zero and believe me when you first time enter in some organization you even do not know to staple your paper in a formal and professional manner. You do not have any idea about managing office
Internship Is Nothing More Than A mess
The third wrong thought is, students do not need to take it seriously and the whole internship time period is just a matter of compulsion (for getting degree) while it is the best time for would be professionals for establishing the network and collecting references.
You Are Welcomed In Organization
last but not the least. Every student on his/her 1st internship, thinks that all the employees of organization are eagerly waiting for him/her to teach them. Well, this nothing more than a wishful thinking because internees are generslly taken as burden and employees think that their time will be wasted if they spend on internees that is why they preferred them giving useless boring work like reading some sort of reports, files and handouts etc. I am not saying that everyone in organization treat you in a manner but yeah most of them have similar behavior. so, what should an internee do? Here the exam begins, you should resist hard to learn things. Ask question without giving the bad mood of your supervisor, silently observe things, try to build friendly environment, be obedient.
I hope you have understood the misconception about internship, these are the thoughts which make our internship period less advantageous. More articles in this regarding are coming so please stay tuned.
