During the course of my summer internship, I had several moments of self-discovery. These were moments that helped me gauge my preparedness to be a part of the professional world and inspect the skills that I possessed or lacked. I present to you a generalised overview of my own experiences as well as those of my fellow internship colleagues at work.
Imposter syndrome
When you go to work as a newbie and are constantly around people who’ve vast more experience than you, you sometimes feel like you are in the wrong place or that you’re soon going to be exposed for your lack of qualification. You might occasionally feel like it’s not your place to take on a certain task or comment about a specific issue due to your junior status or your self-induced belief that you aren’t well qualified. However, it is important to make a distinction between academic qualification and experience based qualification. This brings me to the next two points:
Sometimes people just don’t know
At work it soon became evident that some engineering companies work at the grass root level of their field of expertise. In such scenarios just a general understanding of one’s subject (as enabled by an undergraduate level of education) seems to be insufficient. To achieve a higher level of understanding, it could mean that there is a necessity to dwell deeper into a subject by pursuing a master’s or a PhD. But hold that thought…
On several occasions, it was also comforting to see that most of me senior colleagues (fully grown men and women with Master’s or PhDs) at work didn’t always know what was going on. So everyone teamed up, shared their hunches and gut feelings and slowly built a potential solution to a problem. It’s not always scientific or elegant, but it works.
Apply yourself
In the professional world nobody is sheltered by the academic bubble of assume no friction or take negligible mass or assume no air resistance. Therefore, it takes some effort and thought to arrive at a solution to a problem correctly. It is almost impossible to remember the specific details of the topics taught to me in my engineering course. However, (based on my limited experience) I can say that it is easier to apply the broad based skills that we develop during our studies. And by this I mean things like methods to define and setup problems, identify difficulties and bottlenecks, predict a time-scale, establish objectives and propose a plan of action. Do and then you will know.
Learning has to be continuous and life-long
We try our best to learn all that we can. But there is just too much out there for one to learn over just four years of their degree. And so it is important to tune ourselves to be able to receive new packets of information and be open to looking at things differently or doing old tasks in new ways. Always be willing to ask questions. People love it when they get the opportunity to explain their work to you. In the process, you help them improve their understanding, better yours and also make new friends.
Pay attention to your minute feelings of irritation, boredom and demotivation
Such feelings give you some brief insight about how you might feel about doing your type of work on a day to day basis. Your job could grow onto you or you might realise that you actually prefer working on / as something else altogether. The beauty and convenience of an internship is just that, it allows you to see what your likes, dislikes and preferences at the workplace are before committing full-time to it.