Ten strategies for impactful internships

Internships help both stakeholders — students and potential employers. They enable students to gain firsthand knowledge of the workplace, giving them an idea of the demands of the actual working environment and the professional and life-oriented skill sets required to survive and thrive in such settings. Internships help recruiters, who will have the option not only to mentor interns but also to absorb them once they are career-ready. 

Higher education institutions should develop appropriate strategies to improve the quality of internships.

1. Internships should be mandatory. All higher education institutions should ensure the integration of theory and application, which ultimately leads to knowledge production. 

2. Internships should be introduced only when students have acquired enough domain knowledge. Put differently, first- and second-year undergraduate students are not yet sufficiently oriented or mature enough to pursue internships that require interacting with external stakeholders, which is demanding and could even dent their self-confidence when things go wrong. It should be borne in mind that third-year undergraduates and post-graduates are internship-ready; therefore, internships should be scheduled after the fifth semester for four-year UG degree programmes and after the first semester for PG programmes.

3. When students are asked to find internships on their own, the head of the department or the course teacher should provide them with recommendation letters that highlight their interests and aspirations, as well as their specific internship-oriented skills, which will facilitate organisations' decisions about awarding internships.

4. Students should be encouraged to seek internships at start-ups and other growing organisations, where there are better opportunities to learn than in well-established organisations, where they will be required to stick to a routine. Quite a few establishments keep interns at the periphery and treat them as ‘kids’ who need certificates. Therefore, students should be enterprising while choosing organisations for internships.

5. The internship duration should be clearly spelt out and should be worked out in terms of academic credits. Currently, internships last a few days to a few weeks and sometimes a whole semester, especially for students of professional courses. Clear norms, syncing duration with credits, should be in place to make internships structured and productive.

6. Internships should be supervised by both the course teacher and the on-site expert. And there should be coordination between the two, especially regarding feedback and midcourse corrections. A little handholding would go a long way, especially in the initial stages, and give the interns the confidence and orientation to march ahead. 

7. Institutions should conduct exit interviews upon their students’ completion of internships. Such analysis, examining the learning outcome of these immersion programmes, will help institutions make appropriate decisions regarding sending subsequent batches to these workplaces. Organisations also benefit from exit interviews, which shed light on which aspects of internships were helpful to students and what needs to be customised to suit students’ aptitudes and skill sets.

8. Institutions should ink MoUs with organisations that send their students for internships. Such formal agreements help both parties and make it relatively easier to secure internships.

9. Students, even after collecting their completion certificates, should be encouraged to remain in touch with the organisations where they interned, and this will brighten their employment prospects. In due course, these organisations will view their former interns as potential future employees.

Finally, internships should not be allowed to degenerate into money-making enterprises by unethical CEOs who capitalise on the high demand for internships. The introduction of the four-year undergraduate degree programme, in which internships, along with other forms of experiential learning, have been made mandatory, has sharply increased the demand for internships and encouraged ‘paid’ internships; this trend has to be dealt with decisively.

(The author is an academic based in Dindigul, Tamil Nadu)