What makes an internship meaningful?

I got 2 kick-starts in my career, a part-time job in 2009, and an overseas internship in 2010. I dropped a production database on the first day into the former, and was so ill-prepared in the latter I didn’t look up the place’s climate and local language till I was already on the plane. Both were privileges. They catapulted me into worlds I couldn’t fathom and shaped my career in the following decade. In turn, as I have built startups, I have also been on and off in building internship programs. My number one concern is to replicate the magics I got to experience for the next generation. I am writing this for you who are seeking an internship opportunity.

What makes an internship meaningful? I ask this a lot, and the most common answer I receive is “a new experience outside of school”. That’s right. Much of what we do in life is to propel ourselves into new experiences. As a species, we are a bit of an adrenaline junkie (and serotonin, caffeine, and cocaine). But it is not particularly good at answering the question.

A new experience is undoubtedly crucial for an internship, but if it is solely what makes an internship meaningful, wouldn’t picking up something entirely opposite to your education offer the most exposure? I am a software engineer by train, but the course that awed me the most in college was a general elective, macroeconomy. It expanded my horizon, but I wouldn’t have considered an internship in a central bank, it would have ventured too far away from what I wanted to do. An internship should represent a certain level of relevancy to your long-term career.

An internship is only as meaningful as the mentorship it can provide. The transition to the workforce is the transition from theoretical information into practical knowledge. The rigid structure of the curriculum makes it hard to grasp some key concepts of software engineering. At the end of my degree, I was still not sure if my code was clean - there was no need to reopen last semester’s assignments, my architecture was flexible to changes - no assignment lasted for more than a semester, or my software could be released in small, iterative circles - all assignments were fixed time-box. And it took years for me to get comfortable around these concepts. It was frustrating navigating in uncertainties. I wish someone was there telling me what I did wrong. In the language of the Dunning Kruger effect, my descent from the peak of Mt Stupid to the valley of Despair was rough.

A good mentor can ease the journey. Mentorship provides a sense of trusted guidance a personal friend can give with the bonus rule of being the manager. They help you to transit from a student to a professional.

Lastly, an internship implies getting out of the sandbox. At school, you are learning in isolation, a designed system, a less glamorous version of The Matrix. You spend your days solving imaginary problems and gaining imaginary successes. None of which reliably predicts your success at work, otherwise everyone would be boasting their GPAs now. And if you slip here and there, other than some awkward group assignments, there is hardly any difference in the grand scheme of things.

At work, however, there are consequences to your actions. There might be works whose input relies on your delivery. There might be deadlines that are not arbitrary choices dictated by a course’s curriculum but coordinative milestones to align other efforts. And there might be actual end-users of whatever you are delivering. An internship that can’t offer this sense of ownership is nothing but yet another simulation box.

Compared to the previous two elements, giving someone who has zero experience ownership is considerably more complicated. Many internship programs are decided by management or HR.

• Management wants to establish a partnership with a university and an internship is a low effort investment.
• Next year recruitment might get harder if none happens this year. Out of sign, out of mind.
• Doing the dean's office a favor. True story.

While there is nothing wrong with these reasons, too often they are used as excuses to force the internship upon the team adopting you. A forced internship can go wrong in a couple of ways. 

(1) You can be treated as junior developers and go through the same onboarding experience. The thing is, internships are typically short, and by the end of it, you would come back to school to continue your studies, usually, right at the point the onboarding has just been over. The internship is then an overwhelming experience for you and a waste of time for the team.

(2) You might not be ready to work on production code yet so a common solution is to make up an internship project nobody needs. The general lack of coordination between those who want to host an internship and those who are in charge of it results in uncreative half-assed ideas, such as cloning a working piece of software, building an internal tool whose specifications were a few Slack messages, conducting an experiment that the mentor has not made any progress recently, etc. 

A better internship experience can be built with buy-in from the team. An internship fulfilling the needs of the team can be a constructive experience for everyone involved. It could be to give someone new to management a chance to run his own (intern) team before reaching out for a more substantial responsibility. It could be an isolated project with actual stakeholders who have good incentives to invest in its success. And it could also be an experiment, a research topic, but goals, direction, and companionship should come with it. In short, seek out to align the success of the team and the success of the internship.

Too many internship hours were wasted on demo code no one reads and pet projects no one uses. I hope yours would be better.