Are Internships Necessary?

Are Internships Necessary?

Huang Guitian, Assistant President of Peking University, denounced the necessity of internships for college students and called on a ban on student internships at a forum in May, saying that internships would negatively influence students. In his view, in the current job market, employers overemphasize the importance of graduates’ internship and even neglect students’ academic performance and morality, which gravely affects the normal teaching at school. He also said that according to a survey he conducted, 80 percent of the students do nothing but run errands during internships, and only a few of them get job offers in the end.

Huang’s point of view sparked fierce debate on the Internet. While some say internships should be prohibited, others argue the internship system is necessary and just needs to be further rationalized and institutionalized. In an online vote on Sina’s microblog, around 33.4 percent of more than 1,000 participants said that internships should be forbidden, because they mean nothing but running errands to students, and they will affect school work. About 26.1 percent of the participants think that internships are a necessary step for students to get to know society. Around 49 percent of the participants hold that even if interns just run errands, the working experience is still helpful to them so long as they make efforts to learn something.

The following are excerpts of some opinions.

Yang Yang (Sina Weibo): College students should make the goals of their internships clear. In other words, what do they expect to get from internships? First, making money is not the primary purpose. Second, an intern can get to know the working environment of a workplace. Third, an intern can learn the culture and working style of a company, such as the way of thinking and communication of employees there, so that he or she can adapt to it faster in the future. Fourth, employers will have a good impression of an excellent intern. Finally, student interns should remember that internships are not necessarily to improve their academic levels.

Zhang Chunwei (China National Radio): Outstanding interns can win themselves more opportunities or job offers. As employers, we can predict the future of the interns from how they deal with details. School courses do not teach you how to work with people, but your real experience accumulated in work will. Working experience can also teach us how to tell right from wrong. It is understandable that university students want a higher starting platform than others, but they need to prove that they deserve it. Thus, doing an internship is a good choice.

Zhao Ye (www.ifeng.com): Even running errands can be a way of selfimprovement because students can take advantage of the opportunity to get to know how the company operates. It is understandable that some employers don’t give interns important tasks as it is hardly possible for interns to accomplish the work well during the limited internship period. Therefore, I always tell my students: if you know how to learn from others and from your experience, you’ll do better in your work. In this way, even if it is just running errands, it still means a lot to you.

Li Weicheng (www. ifeng.com): Today there are two problems with internships. First, companies are reluctant to accept college students as interns. Second, college students show an indifferent attitude toward internships. From my perspective, the possible reasons are that enterprises lack confidence in students’ professional ability and worry that interns’ work will affect the normal work of the company. On the other hand, interns are not enthusiastic about the work because they may think the company is not the one that they would work for in the future.

But, in my opinion, both taking courses at school and doing internships are forms of studying, but only in different forms. For university students, knowledge learned from books need to be put into practice. For instance, being interns for years before becoming qualified doctors is a common situation for medical majors abroad. The situation is the same for teachers. Therefore, abolishing the internship system is not a reasonable suggestion.

Zhang Tianwei (Beijing Youth Daily): It’s unwise to arbitrarily deny all internships. Recently, several broadcasting major students of the Communication University of China have attracted much attention from the public by anchoring news programs on the China Central Television news channel as interns. This might be a successful example of complementarity of school study and internships.

As for Huang’s remarks on internships, I think they are not groundless. Huang is an economist and his remarks are mainly directed to students of economics major. The subject is a research-oriented one and requires a lot of academic work. For students of economics major, completing four years’ academic work is the primary goal. Imposing internships or job-hunting on them during this period really adds to the burden on them.

So, college students can be classified into two groups. For colleges and majors that focus on preparing students for future jobs, internships are important, as students’ work clear about the orientation of the school or the major—whether it is research-oriented or job-oriented, and to provide a corresponding environment for their students. Meanwhile, schools need to respect their students’ career goals and job choices, and to provide practical and useful help accordingly.

Yuan Yue (Sina Weibo): Internships and academic work are complementary to each other. Internships are irreplaceable, as college academic study cannot equip students with professional skills required by employers. Some students might be doing very well in school work, but when it comes to real work practice, they find themselves helpless. In this case, internships can help them develop practical skills. Nowadays the ability might be more valued by employers. Comparatively speaking, for colleges and majors that focus on academic research, students there seem to need more time on study and research than on internships.

We should acknowledge that in recent years, Chinese schools have put more and more emphasis on the proportion of students entering schools of a higher grade or getting employed after graduation. In my opinion, this kind of utilitarian thinking in the education system is the root of the problems in the internship system.

Thus, what the Chinese education system needs now is a gradual change of the utilitarianism-guided education concept. As for university administrators, they need to be internship system is universally practiced. But in China, how to make internships more helpful and useful to students is something we need to work out.

Hong Chengwen (www.ifeng.com): Some developed countries improved their internship system by introducing changes regarding the settings of curriculum. For example, in Britain, the “work-based learning”policy combines off-campus internships with full-time degree courses, making it part of students’ school life. The British Government subsidizes the companies that use interns, and students’ internships usually last less than a year. Although internships are now popular around China, regulations to protect and help students are still missing.