Since the start of my three months summer vacation, I have been asking myself a lot of that question lately. Almost all of my close friends applied for an internship, citing reasons like not wanting to waste time, wanting to earn a little pocket money and wanting the resume to look good for applying for the internship. I, on the other hand, happened to be the odd one out as from the start, I had my mind set not to apply for any work and chose instead to be part of my hall's orientation committee.
However, as the days progressed and as I spent more time with Eusoff Hall's orientation committee (EHOC), although I sometimes still feel left out by all the conversations among my friends about work., I find myself asking that question much less often now. I realized that when it comes to life, you must sometimes do the things that you really enjoy doing rather than the things your friends are doing. And being in EHOC is one of the things that I enjoy doing.
From what I see, internship is mostly a boring routine. Because you're an intern, companies would mostly give you menial and boring tasks like sorting out papers or data entry. You do not get to do the exciting stuff like leadership or planning projects because you're not yet qualified. (Standard Charetered Bank, however, is one exception that I've seen). And by the end of the day, you'll be bored out of your wits wishing that the internship period would come to an end as soon as possible.
I also observed that most people are doing internship for the sake of doing internship. For them, they do not care what kind of internship they are doing, as long as it's an internship. When asked what did they learn, mostly it will be about how boring work life would get.
For me, I cannot stand doing this type of work. Which was why I chose to join EHOC rather than take up an internship position. I knew that with my second year Arts degree, I would not be qualified to do most of the good internships out there. At most, I will land on a job that requires me to do some boring stuff that I could get paid double for if I do it as a part time job.
Besides, I also foresee that the kind of experience that I get from the internship would not be a very enlightening one. What can you really learn from data entry, anyway? Super fast typing speed?
I would really much prefer to be involved in planning something big, something like the hall orientation that includes over 200 people and I can bet that the experience you get from organizing such big events beats data entry experience any time of the day. And in the process, you'll get to know a lot of new people and forge loads of new friendships.
And honestly, I'm not too eager to work either. Like how my dad used to say, you can work all you want, even for the rest of your life but the student life is very limited. Once you step into the working world, it would be very hard to turn back time and be a student again. The student experience is a really rare one and even if you could be a student again after you start work, the entire experience would not be the same anymore. You'll feel old.
Which is why while I can still enjoy student life, I will enjoy it to the fullest. I love the life I'm living now and I definitely have no qualms about not having an internship as compared to other university graduates. Because I love what I am doing and like I said, EHOC beats internship any time of the day.
I guess that is why I did not apply for an internship.
1 comments:
heh actually not every Arts Year 2 student ends up with a data entry/routine/boring job. :)
mine's been pretty interesting so far. and i do different things every day. ^__^
but glad to hear you're enjoying EHOC! jiayou and have fun lukey! ^_^
cheers
nicnic
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