Written in response to an entry by Dave on his Netblog:
Interns are the best. I just got promoted and may have to give up the few I have now (what kind of perk is that?!), though I may negotiate to create an internship slot for my new position.
Of course, there are drawbacks:
- most interns have to be supervised very closely. Several that I’ve had here have been extremely creative at finding unexpected ways to muck up simple projects.
- sometimes they try too hard in useless (and unexpected!) ways. I asked one to update a database and gave him a key of abbreviations that we use in it. Instead of using the abbreviations, he wrote out every word because, he later said, it looked “more professional.” So much for searching through it, though…
- others ask too many questions altogether. I frequently ask interns to write brief book and research summaries for me so that I can decide what I want to look into more closely. After I gave her a stack of example summaries and some new publications to go over, one intern asks me: “how long do you want the summaries to be?” “So how many words would that be?” “What style do you want?” (n.b., that she didn’t understand my response to this latter question: “AP”) “Can I type them up in Word?” “How much time should I spend on each?” “Do you want me to print them out?” Etc., etc.
- …then they disregard your answers to those questions. On the summarizing assignment, one intern, after working for TWO days, handed me two 3-page summaries. The longest example that I had given him was between one-third and half of a page.
- sometimes they’re just dumb. I had one who, on an opposition reseach assignment, handed me a manila folder with about 1,000 pages printed off the Web, the results of a Google search (thanks Dave!), actually. I thanked her and threw it out.
- many are simply incompetent. I have have had interns from some of the best schools in the country (incl. Ivies, though not Dartmouth) who couldn’t write a complete sentence if their lives depended on it. Isn’t that a requirement at some point in the educational system prior to college matriculation? I had one intern work on filing over the summer; we’re still finding things in the damnedest places!
- all of them like to talk, a lot. Kibbitz, shoot the breeze, BS, whatever. Sitting at their desks quietly and working, however, they seem to like less.
Given all of this, however, I really do like having interns and working with them and trying to correct some of these deficiencies and teach them a bit about political philosophy, economics, and how things work in Washington.
For anyone reading this still in college, I would suggest that if you accept an internship and apply yourself to it moderately, you should surpass the achievements of any interns your employer is likely to have had, ever, and benefit with connections, recommendations, and maybe evern a job offer. The quality of the general pool (even here, where, I’m told, our standards are relatively high and acceptance rate low) is very poor, and it wouldn’t take much to rise out of and above it.