Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash
One and a half years ago I finished my internship at the eScience Center. Based on my own experiences and those of others around me, I think that internships are a unique moment in anyone’s career. The lessons learned during this period have a big impact on your professional future.
In my case, the main lesson learned was the importance of code quality for making it impactful in science. Instead of just getting code to work, I learned the value of good quality code for making it maintainable and reusable, thereby increasing the impact in my scientific field.
Timing is perfect
By learning the abovementioned skills during my internship I can focus on this aspect during my PhD and truly put this lesson into action. Besides this being a very good lesson to learn in general, I think the timing of learning this during my internship actually increased the effect this lesson will have on me and on the work I do. I think this makes my personal experience a relevant example of the impact that valuable lessons can have during internships.
The first reason why the timing of an internship will increase the impact is that it is very early in a career. This means that there is still a lot of room to learn new skills, and most importantly, to actually apply these skills. Especially in science, a lot of the work is done by PhD students. Therefore, learning these skills before the start of your PhD is crucial to actually still having time to apply them.
But, what makes the timing of an internship so unique? If the earlier you learn something the more impact it has, why not learn it during your bachelor? Why not in high school or even earlier? The answer is that there are many unique lessons that are only valuable for very specific fields and you simply cannot learn all of them in one bachelor. Nowadays in science, you need to specialize a lot, and this makes a lesson only valuable if it is thought to someone that actually continues in a career where this lesson is relevant.
Spreading the word
The second reason why a lesson learned in an internship can have a large impact is that a good lesson is also shared with colleagues and other students. Thereby any lesson you learn not only has an impact on yourself, but also on anyone else you teach. For instance, I started working as a PhD student in a bioinformatics group. Now, 1 year in, I have supervised two students and shared advice on improving code quality with them. I also shared this with multiple direct colleagues that currently implement these lessons and teach them to others. In the same way, I learn from the lessons my supervisors and direct colleagues learned.
The fact that teaching others can truly increase impact can also be used as an argument to teach important lessons to people further along in their careers. Why not try to teach new lessons to a professor, or a postdoc, so they can teach the lesson learned to as many PhDs as possible, so they can spread this again? What makes this difficult is that to truly understand the value of a skill it is crucial to actually apply it. For a postdoc or a professor, it will be very difficult to find the time to get familiar enough with the lesson to be able to efficiently teach it to others as well.
Considering an internship?
Internships are a unique moment in your career. You are far enough in your studies that you will likely continue in a specific field, but early enough that you still have the time to learn new skills and really put them into practice. My advice to anyone starting an internship is to use this time to invest in learning new skills. I also have some advice for companies: take teaching your interns seriously, since this might have a bigger impact than you think.
