"There is No Partial Credit!" - In support of Internships / Coop Programs

“There is no partial credit!”

“You need to get your code done on time, well-tested, and well-written. If you don’t, you let your team down, you let your mentors down, and you let your manager down. The expectation is that everything works, 100%”

I was holding an exit interview with first-time college intern Kate (names are changed to protect confidentiality), and she was telling me the biggest lessons she learned during her summer experience. Not at all like homework or lab work in the classroom.

“There are no office hours.”

“When you get in trouble, you must learn to take control and find the help you need. Your mentor may not always know the answer, or even where to find it. You don’t have a TA or professor who will always be there to show you what to do.”

Exit interview with Barry. Same theme: This is so different than the classroom!

“Things change on us mid-project.”

“We were getting close to having our work done so we could demonstrate our feature, and a new feature came in that was higher priority. Martin and I were very frustrated, we just wanted to finish it, but the new work took priority and all of our time.”

This was Benjamin. He had learned hands-on about the agile and disruptive nature of the work world.

“You get blocked, over and over, waiting on something from someone else.”

“My work was dependent on code I needed from our infrastructure team. They told me it was not a priority right now. My concern about needing to complete it by the end of my internship was not important. I had to wait three weeks.”

Madison learned a valuable lesson. Dependencies between organizations do not always align in importance. Again, not at all like the classroom.

Valuable Lessons

Don’t get me wrong, the tone of the interviews was very positive. My interns were set up with real work and developing product for real customers. What this group has learned are valuable lessons in the business world. And they were very thankful to know how things really worked.

The exciting thing for me was that they were all taking this new-found knowledge back to school. I’m confident they would approach their lab work, assignments, and studies in a new light.

I’m convinced intern and coop programs are an invaluable teaching addition for students as part of their college education. The programs could also be a solution to the “hard to afford and finance” cost of tuition, as noted by Forbes, by having corporations help share the cost.

As Stephan told me at the end of his interview, “I had to figure out how to switch over to more important work but preserve what I had done so myself or someone else could pick it up smoothly in the future. It was tough!”

Wow. Change management is tough. What a valuable lesson to learn at the start of your career!