Thursday, February 26, 2015
The 25 Best Companies For Interns
Fast Company | Business + Innovation: You won’t see interns at any of these 25 companies fetching coffee, doing data entry, or providing mind-numbing support work. The top internship programs in America in 2015 instead provide eager students and recent graduates real-world experience alongside talented coworkers and superiors.
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5 comments:
Looking at interning opportunities can be a very stressful business. I find it extremely hard having to balance my work schedule here at school and filling out all the paper very time consuming to where I can't even think about anything else. Read this article felt like a break, almost an entertaining reading on what is out there and what is available to those who are interested in getting the best internship that they can. It's very weird to think that some of the best internships are at state farm and facebook and places that I didn't even know had internships. But it seems looking at this list gives me some high hopes. My only problem is that financially I can't do these internships, but I could do one in my home town. So I'm hoping that my connections with Universal and Disney pay off for me this summer so I can learn and be involved with something I could be interested in for the future.
Internships are hard to apply for and even worse one you are working through one. A lot of internships are extremely exploitative whether that be through making you do menial jobs without teaching you anything about the business you are interested in or through making you work past normal business hours doing jobs that you should be being compensated for.
While this is true as the article points out there are some amazing companies out there who are really looking to teach the next generation of the wore force useful skill and inform them about the in and outs of their chosen career paths.
At the end of the day whether you get a terrible internship or a great one, I think you can always come away having learned something about an industry you were interested in or the type of worker you are going to be, and that is always useful.
It is great that many companies have changed the way they treat interns. I think it is important for interns to be doing actual work that has to do with the work of the company. That is the only way they can really learn about the job and the processes that go into creating the product of the company. Interns are not going to learn anything if they spend their time getting coffee or making copies all the time. When people think of interns, those are the tasks that are usually associated with them. It is important that most interns receive job offers after interning with a company for some time. Getting a job can be very difficult, but the interning process can make it a lot easier. Even if they are not offered a job, they have created many connections and learned valuable skills that will help them in the future.
In my previous work as an intern, it was often surprising (both to me and my managers) how often I would look at a task a full employee was working on and know that I could do it as well, or better. Thank goodness I've worked in environments where my managers have genuinely capitalized on my abilities. Mistreating or underutilizing interns cripples the future generation of workers and potential employees. Either the interns are chased away from the industry, or if they are hired later, they expect to work as they did as an intern.
It is gratifying to hear that such large companies like Facebook are recognizing that interns are capable and can contribute meaningful work. If interns can do the work, and do it well, there is no reason a title or difference in position should stand in the way. Hopefully more companies will follow in Facebook's footsteps.
Recalling my intern experience from last summer I honest very pleased and feel very grateful that I did not have the "typical" intern experience. My intern experience for me changed my life because it helped me clearly see my career path and help set up a driving goal in my education. I owe that mostly to the company but also to the person in charge of me for the summer. He told me from day one that my first responsibility was to always ask questions and listen to the answer. Very fast I got over my fear of asking a dumb question and began to take so much more out of my experience because I was there to learn and understand. If it had not been for the stipend I don’t know if I could have afforded the experience because majority of the stipend was going toward the cost of my commute. It just horrified me to learn that there were internships where people were paying to do the grunt work and being go-fers and making coffee runs. And that this has all been justified as okay because it has been seen as paying their dues to the industry. First off I completely reject that ideal because I see that as a cruel lying to oneself and companies brainwashing intern into being free labor all so they can get “experience”.
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