Benefits and Challenges of an Internship (2)

           Every student, every future specialist in any field goes through an important and worrying period in his/her studies, which is called internship. During an internship students of 3^rd or 4^th year of study apply acquired knowledge in practice and get some experience in their profession.

The internship has a lot of benefits on the one hand, and challenges on the other. Namely benefits and challenges of an internship will be discussed further.

Probably, the greatest benefit of an internship is that after it students become more confident in themselves and their future profession. Studying at University one can doubt if he/she made the right choice, or think that he/she could not cope with chosen profession. But little by little, practicing day by day and trying to do all their best students finally realize that there is nothing frightening and lose fear of failure.

Moreover there are people who can help. Interns work with more experienced people who share their experience and peculiarities of the profession. They point out the mistakes, so that interns do not repeat them in future. Thanks to their instructions and pieces of advice interns improve their skills in chosen profession.

Besides improving the skills interns learn how to act when an unforeseen situation occurs. There are things that simply cannot be taught at University during theoretical classes and which you can learn only from your own experience.

To all the enumerated benefits I can add that an internship is students’ time to demonstrate all their abilities, their potential and strength. And not to others, but in the first instance, to demonstrate all these to themselves.

Unfortunately, there are not only benefits in the internship. As a rule, every student meets some challenges, too. First one is that some interns are forced to do some other job, which is not connected with profession. Some leaders of organization, where interns do the internship solve their own problems. They ask interns to go somewhere, to bring or to buy something. So, they make students do things which they are not supposed to do and thus, students do not manage to get enough experience.

Another challenge which probably bothers most of the interns is that they can hardly apply for a job in the place where the internship was done. It would be better if there were a chance to get a job in the organization where you practiced. But the truth is that it is almost impossible.

In conclusion I can say that in spite of some disadvantages of an internship every student should use the chance to do it, because  this is the perfect time  to decide whether the chosen profession is his /her vocation or not.