I had dinner with one of my friends earlier this week who is doing an in-person internship (in a different field). Having been an intern before, I've found that every site and site supervisor operates differently. Talking with my friend over dinner, I found that her experience was very different and yet very similar to my own experiences.
It would be worth noting that she is working in a lab at a fairly reputable academic institution who work with a lot of interns. They seem to have a fairly well established bureaucratic hierarchy that allows them to delegate tasks and manage their interns in a way that is quite different and yet somewhat similar to the way our virtual internship is managed.
After our intern group meeting this week, I began thinking more about the differences and similarities between her experience and mine.
Both our schools require a class to support our intern experiences. She didn't say much about her class so I suppose that when compared to the actual internship it's somewhat unremarkable.
Her internship site is very different from mine. In addition to the obvious factors like her site being a science lab and mine having nothing to do with science and the simple fact that she goes in in-person and I am a virtual worker, she works with a large organization whereas I work with a small one. While both our site supervisors offer support and guidance, her site appears to take on more of a teaching role in that they assign mentors to their interns who act as task masters, supervisors, and career counselors.
One thing that stood out to me from our meeting this week was the notion of being alone on the internet, especially with a virtual internship. Our blogs and class meetings sometimes feel like a one-way conversation. You put your piece out there and people read and observe. Sometimes comments are made or questions are asked but you never really know how to respond and sometimes questions go unanswered. (I've always resisted posting simple 'I concur' comments. It feels like sending a text message with a smiley or a 'lol' and nothing else, but I understand that the silence can be a little scary and discouraging.) My friend's internship site, with its large pool of interns, faculty, grad students, PhD candidates, etc, hosts weekly non-work-related meetings for all its student workers to network and mingle (and drink beer). While I don't think this is necessarily the most practical for virtual interns, the internet does offer a host of other opportunities for people to gather and talk.
In taking on this internship, I've learned a lot about virtual worlds and I think that there is a lot of potential there. Based on my own personal experience, I would say it's a great place for people to meet, gather and chat, but based on what I've learned so far, there are a lot of limitations to making them an accessible gathering place (in addition to the fact that 'virtual worlds' are expanding and redefining themselves in light of changes to social media).
Overall, I think that a virtual internship has a lot of opportunity to function just like an in-person internship but the new, virtual world seems to have created a disconnect in the way we communicate with each other, thus limiting the ways we think about working together when we're not physically together.
I've set my goal of completing my report by Monday (tomorrow) and the deadline approaches, but first... a midterm.
Until next time....
No comments:
Post a Comment