Don't just teach students

The consensus among most students and friends I’ve talked to seems to be that after college there’s a lot of closed doors.

Students are told that to get a job you must have an internship.

Internships can be invaluable. They can land you a toe-hold, build your résumé and help you network.

But there’s also a catch. Sometimes you can wind up doing meaningless work that no one else wants to do.

Last summer I had an internship I would consider one of the best experiences of my life. However, a lot of busywork was also forked over to me, things that didn’t help me learn and didn’t train me at all.

A friend of mine interned this summer and wound up leaving early almost every day because the work he was assigned was irrelevant both to him and to the company.

It can feel a lot like glorified servitude when what we really need is training.

Before I knew it, the summer was over. While I had gained experience that really helped me, I had a feeling that I’d also spent a lot of my time twiddling my thumbs.

The problem seems to lie in a miscommunication between educating students and
training them.

Companies believe the student has gained enough training in college — colleges think that by sending students to internships they will receive training.

In theory, internships make sense. College teaches us higher-level ideas.

Students are not taught trades so much as how to problem-solve and think.

These skills are invaluable, but they lack direction.

How do you gain direction? By getting real-world experience at an actual company.

But with the rapidly changing job market, it seems as if internships are growing less useful. Clearly, more must be done.

Colleges and universities must invest in their students’ physical learning processes, and more intense work needs to be done with internship programs.

If a company is going to offer internships, it shouldn’t just be to get coffee and file paperwork.

There must be serious communication, investment and sharing of knowledge.

People like to walk on eggshells around students.

Don’t. Train them.

Tell them what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong. Don’t just grade them — evaluate them, analyze them, give them advice.

Internships should be an add-on, not a solution.

Use them as a way for students to gain real-world experience after learning intensely in school.

Train the students, don’t just teach them.

­— ewenning@umail.iu.edu
Follow columnist Emma Wenninger on Twitter @EmmaWenninger.