How Covid-19 Has Evolved the Internship Experience
During the course of a student’s academic journey, a big stepping-stone is the opportunity to take lessons learned in the classroom and apply them to real assignments given in an internship.
For years, internships have been used to successfully immerse students into the industry they aspire to enter.
But, is there such a thing as too many internships? How many should an undergrad student be expected to get, if internships are such a big deal?
In an article titled Internships Dos and Don’ts for College Students Angela Copeland says “try to land multiple internships. If you do several internships, especially in different industries, you can refine your career goals. You will also overcome one of the biggest hurdles new grads face: not having enough work experience.”
Chloe Knuckles is a current undergrad at Gordon College studying Communications Arts with a minor in Art and is expected to graduate this May. Chole will be a PR intern this winter at Fresh Impact PR Group and had this to say about her expectations going in.
“This is something I am really looking forward to because internships are important because they give that hands-on experience to known if it’s something that you really want to do. I think we spend so much time in a classroom learning about what it means to do a job and a lot of the history behind it, but I’m actually grateful Gordon requires us to do an internship because it kind of pushes us outside of our comfort zoom. I’m really looking forward to this winter and I’m hoping to ready gain some relative experience for my future job.”
With work experience being the primary goal for a rising professional, and current obstacles around working due to Covid-19 getting increasingly harder, one might be wondering: what is happening in an internship scenario?
An influx of individuals working from home emerged after the Coronavirus pandemic appeared, and changed the way companies do internships and business this year.
An April survey of 110 employers across numerous industries by Handshake found that 60% of companies are offering virtual internships this year.
Many internship programs are finding new ways to adapt to keep this valuable staple in the education process, and are seeing a new normal in the culture.
Now, the question is, what do internships look like for current students? And how are people adapting to remote internships?
Carissa Church, the Internship Coordinator, and Developer for the Career & Connection Institute at Gordon College had this to say,
“There is a massive silver lining in what has happened in the sense that, not only do companies now understand the value of remote working and how much they can actually function efficiently doing so. It actually teaches the employee and managers to hire students with remote internships and still give them a really good academic educational experience for an internship, and still give them a really good hands-on experience.”
Although current student Isaac Bleecker, a 20’ grad and Software Development Intern at Abiomed was not expecting his year to look like this, he remains positive about his experience so far:
“Being an intern in a technology-driven field, transitioning to remote work has actually been pretty seamless. My team already used a lot of modern tools for communication and collaboration, so we’ve doubled down on those. And I really enjoy having more control over my working environment, being at home, and spending less time commuting.”
