Suck it up! Take an Internship first

For most students in business and engineering schools, spending our time on internships during the holidays are a norm. By year 3, we would have pocketed at least 1 internship experience in our pockets. As surprising as this may sound, this might not be so for many students in other faculties.
Aside from the more straightforward reasons as to why one should take up internships; to get exposure to to the working world and to get hands-on experience, here are 3 strong reasons what internships can offer:
1. An internship validates your passion
Is coding just an innocent hobby that is best practiced in your spare time, or something worth doing everyday, as a career? Hint: Pause a moment before you jump to answer. Because the mistake that many of us have made time and time again, is to ascertain without much thought.
An internship helps by validating whether your interest is purely something you enjoy doing, or something that makes everything else worth doing.
2. An internship turns your interest into practice
Remember when discussing how to turn your hobby into a career, we’ve talked about the stages of acquiring and mastering a skill? It all starts with an interest, which compels you to pay attention to things and people related to your interest, which leads to you wanting to practice applying your knowledge and observation into real life situations. It is from this consistent practice that a skill may be acquired and perfected over time.
An internship provides the opportunity for you to observe your interests being practiced by individuals with knowledge and experience in the field. You get first-hand insights into how programming, design, marketing, etc. is used in a business or corporate context. Surrounding yourself with experts and practitioners in the field also gives you an insider’s account of what it is like spending your career doing what you love.
3. An internship turns your hobbies into skills
The last stage, practicing the trade after paying sufficient attention to how it is done, is the most important in the acquiring and refining of skills. An internship gives you just that. You’ll get to practice what you love in the appropriate industry, from which your innocent hobby evolves into a working skill. After this stage is achieved and you have overcome the initial steep learning curve, all that is left to do is constantly refining and updating that skill to keep up with the industry. And…. Congratulations! You can now make a career of doing what you love.
Looking for an internship? Click here and apply to these opportunities now.
Author: Hong Van Nguyen
Editor: Bryan Lee
Sources:
http://lifehacker.com/top-10-ways-to-find-your-career-path-1628537579, http://www.ready4work.my/career-guide/career-advice/finding-your-passion/the-internship-advantage-ashwin, http://www.ua.edu/features/findyourpassion/internship.html, https://www.wetfeet.com/articles/college-students-follow-your-passion, https://www.wetfeet.com/articles/college-students-follow-your-passion

