Internships are like stepping stones which lead you to your career in the professional world. It is only during the internships that one gets to know and practice professional etiquettes, understands how everything is managed and how to put all his or her bookish knowledge into the practical world to achieve the expected outcomes. In today’s competitive world, having an internship during or after completing the graduate or the post-graduate degree, will exponentially increase the chances of the student getting placed in a respectable position of a reputed company.
Generally, internships are of 2 types: paid and unpaid internships, with the major difference being: in a paid internship, the company or the organization you are working for provides a stipend; in unpaid internships, there is no room for stipends. Although some students get paid internships where the workload is more strenuous, most of the students go for the unpaid ones where they get the time to cope up with the surroundings and adjust to the change from the college to the corporate world; as the workload is less, they get time for themselves too. Here, we will discuss the pros and cons of unpaid internships, leaving aside the paid ones:
The Pros
Starting with the pros of unpaid internships, the most important one is the flexibility that the intern gets. It appears just like a regular training process where you are trained to handle the jobs of your sector and do the basic official works that fall under the domain of your study. You get the time required to familiarize yourself with the corporate work culture and also behavioural etiquette amongst the office peers, which is definitely much different from those used in the college groups. It is quite different from paid ones, keeping the exceptions in mind, where you have to either work on a lot of things or submit your work by the deadline, thus having no time for yourself. So, by the time you are done with the internship, you are quite ready to grab a job.
Another thing to notice is that most of the unpaid internships are provided by the startups or the small companies and since they have a lot of connections and very small number of employees, you can use the connections to find the job you want for or even settle in the company in a respectable position owing to the experience, employability and using your etiquette. Another plus point of these types of internships is that unpaid internships can also be undertaken while staying at home, where you just need to complete the work and submit it to the company using e-mails or any other means, thus saving your travelling time and energy.
The Cons
As discussed earlier, most of the unpaid internships are provided by the small and regional companies having a small number of employees and the intern might be made to work on diverse subjects like management, small audits and many more. So, the interns might not be able to properly brush up the skills they have, which was the main reason behind the student joining the internship.
If the internship is a work-in-office type, he or she will lose a lot of time and will be spending more on travelling, food, etc. It might also happen that the intern will lose interest in the internship as he or she will be getting no rewards for the hard work he or she is providing to the company and leave the internship mid-way, thus losing the internship certificate that would have later increased his or her chances of grabbing the job of choice. So weigh your options and choose the type of internship wisely.
