Q: Is it professionally sound, as a fourth-year student, to be applying for internships rather than permanent positions?
Robyn, Maine
A: That’s a good question, Robyn. We take a range of interns at the Free Press, including fresh grads, and once had interns ranging in age from 18 to 63.
The answer to your question depends on three things. How much experience do you have? How clear is your fix on the type of work you’d like to do? What’s your tolerance for change?
If you have no professional experience, newspapers may give you experience as an intern that they wouldn’t dream of giving you with a full-time offer. They want to minimize they’re risk in taking someone untried. Because an internship is for a fixed term, say three months, this limits the newspaper’s liability. It’s easier to take a chance on someone for three months, get a look at their work and then decide whether to go for a permanent hire. In these cases, internships are treated as tryouts.
If you’re dead sure what kind of work you’d like to do, and where you’d like to do it, you might just want to start looking for permanent jobs. If, however, you need to do some sampling before you get to that kind of clarity, internships can help. A fixed-term internship takes some of the risk out of the decision for you. In a sense, the intern is giving the newspaper — or an assignment — a tryout.
Finally, think about how ready you are for change. Taking an internship after graduation likely means you’ll move once, after school, and again three or four months later. Then you really will need to find a job, but the work you do during an internship should give you a lot more to prove your case that you’re ready to be hired.
A couple things to watch for: internship programs that are explicitly not interested in fresh grads, and the timing thing. Most internships are awarded months in advance, such as January commitments for June internships. Accepting one means you have effectively taken yourself out of the search for a permanent job until about halfway through your internship. Do not take an internship with the idea that you can dump it if your turn up something permanent in the meantime. Word will get around.
