2.6 Handling Bumps Along the Way
You may encounter obstacles that will make starting the internship seem difficult. One common problem is starting at the internship site later than other students. This predicament is particularly frustrating because it forces you to get the required hours done in a shorter time period and puts you behind on gathering information for your presentation, your paper, or whatever closing activities are required for the site or course. Even if you find and start an internship early, scheduling your hours ineffectively can put pressure on you near the end of the semester when time is running out. Sometimes, however, students encounter problems because they complete the required hours at the site too soon in the course and then have nothing left to contribute to class discussions.
Instead, it is best to try and space your internship hours out evenly during the semester, though it is also a good idea to finish at the site a little before the end of the semester so that you are not overburdened at the end. Pacing is important, as learning takes time, not just work. Finally, it may be of value to try to schedule your days at the site when there are richer training opportunities. For example, a site may do individual work on one day and group work on another and schedule team meetings or training on a third. Finding a way to be exposed to all three opportunities would create a more meaningful internship experience than just participating in one or two of them.
Sometimes agencies offer special continuing education activities for staff or take them to local, regional, or even national conferences where major speakers present material. Talking with your supervisor about attending these higher-level professional opportunities is a good idea because what they offer can be added to your résumé as additional forms of advanced training. Remember, no one will know that you are interested in attending such events unless you bring it up.
Progress, Not Perfection
Although you may have years of schooling and other job training, these are not likely to have fully prepared you for your first internship. Your education has helped you develop ideas about how things work and equipped you with information about effective approaches. However, many real-world problems that people face during their internships will not always fit textbook definitions. After all, as discussed in Chapter 1, there is a difference between theory and practice. Similarly, someone who has performed quite competently in previous jobs may find the tasks assigned and carried out during an internship to be significantly different.
In general, the process of acquiring new and complex skills moves slowly, which means you do not have to learn everything overnight. Malcolm Gladwell’s popular book Outliers: The Story of Success (2008) discusses the research of K. Anders Ericsson, which states you need 10,000 hours of practice in order to become an “expert” in a given field. Ther