Observations from the inside — Two weeks left of Maui internship
The midpoint of the Akamai Maui Summer Internship has come and gone. Today we had a meeting with the Center for Adaptive Optics folks who organize this internship. We have these every Friday. While these people undeniably do an amazing job at organizing this whole program these extras in the program are getting old. The number one issue is that the program (writing abstracts and making posters) seems geared towards research. Private businesses don’t typically give interns research. Interns get tasks and small projects. In a 7 week internship it doesn’t make much sense to spend 5 hours of work per week talking with the educational coordinator — no matter how nice the person and how cool they are. It’s just not that productive. On the other hand, it does give each of us insight into what the other interns are doing. And really it seems like everyone isn’t doing much of anything. There was no one today who really openly discussed their project enthusiastically with the coordinator today without some additional questions. Most of the exciting responses included “I’m working on stuff”, “I’m searching the Internet for research”, or “I’m making a database of numbers”. It seems with only two weeks left on the job a majority of the interns are a bit depressed about their projects. How can this be?
Money, motivation, and management. We get paid from the National Science Foundation meaning we are free to every company who gets interns. Free. Companies who get students assigned without prior experience with them largely don’t know what they are getting into. They don’t know what kind of experience each student has and in many cases it seems the whole situation is a burden on the company. They hand you off to someone who’s got too much work to begin with. An intern should help get work done and not be a burden, but this goes back to the selection process — the companies don’t select the students in most cases. Naturally if you throw an outgoing freshman or electrical engineering major into software development, a vast majority of a two-month work period will largely be learning and training. They might get more out of a computer science or software engineering major eh?
The money issue further drives the motivation issue. Interns aren’t that motivated to produce much for a company who’s not even paying them. Digging out early is acceptable because, well, they don’t pay us. The company supervisors don’t particularly seem motivated since again, we are free and don’t particularly know what we’re doing. The whole internship stagnates in many cases and with only 7 weeks there really isn’t time for that.
Many complaints directly relate to supervisors who simply don’t have time to teach and train the interns. They’re often working offsite or too busy with their own deadlines. This is just a matter of preparation for taking on interns. If they were more involved in the selection process like they were hiring a real employee the situation might be a bit easier on them.
More involvement on the tech company’s part could greatly improve this program. In fact, they should be jumping at this opportunity since there’s probably no safer way to recruit than through internships. The educational coordination should loosen its grip on all the scheduling. Work dates should be extended several weeks and become flexible depending on the student’s school schedule. The short course and trip up Haleakala where all the interns get to meet should continue, but work for individuals could begin earlier if needed. The ambitious tech company could shell out $10/hr and combined with the 3000 stipend that would make for one super competitive internship. Even if they only put out minimum wage the internship would beat out the national averages.
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My personal experience at Textron Systems has improved greatly, but again the internship feels too short. They gave me a small design project that is actually pretty enjoyable. More on that later. Mostly though, since work began so slow with little significant work accomplished in the first half I feeling a bit of pressure to make up for that and get this project done. Eleven days to go.
July 10th, 2006 at 1:31 pm
Hey Keizo! I think that this is not only completely accurate, but also wonderfully written. It seems as if everything I have been complaining about/ feeling for the last month has just been expressed here. I think that if you sent this into Malika it would be very beneficial for the program. I would also appreciate it myself because it would make me happy to know that the very thing I’ve been wanting to say, but could never put together in the right words, was still shared with the right people. Its up to you…but I think after our lunch conversation, its a consensus
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