Internships

Questions and model answers

1. If you took an internship, what would you most want to get out of it?

   To find out whether I actually like the work, which sounds low-ambition but you can't get it any other way. I can read about a job for a year and still not know whether the Tuesday afternoons are bearable. That's what an internship answers. Skills matter less to me, partly because most of what you learn in ten weeks is that organization's version of the job rather than the job. And the one thing I wouldn't go in expecting is mentorship. It happens, but the people who'd be good at it are the busiest ones there, and turning up assuming it's owed to you is how interns end up disappointed. If you ask for twenty minutes you usually get it. Waiting to be offered it doesn't work.

2. Would you rather take a paid internship at a small company or an unpaid one at a famous company?

   Paid at the small company, and it isn't close for me. At a small place you get given real work because there is nobody else to do it — I know someone who rebuilt a booking system in nine weeks at a company of eleven people, which she could not have touched at a large one. The famous name helps for about one round of one future application, and after that people ask what you did. But the honest reason is the money. Unpaid work quietly filters for people whose parents can carry them, and I would rather not pretend that is a level choice everyone gets to make on the merits. A friend of mine turned down a good one because she couldn't cover the rent.

3. Tell me about a time you were given far less to do than you expected.

   A summer job in an office where, for the first two weeks, I genuinely had nothing. I'd finished what they gave me by Tuesday and then sat there refreshing an empty inbox, too embarrassed to say so. What I eventually did was ask one person — not my manager, the woman who seemed most overloaded — whether there was anything she kept meaning to do and never got to. She had a list of about six things. Three of them turned into my whole summer. Looking back, the mistake was treating it as their failure to plan rather than my problem to solve, and I lost two weeks to that. Nobody was ever going to notice I was idle; they were busy.

4. Do you think unpaid internships should be banned?

   Where the work is real, yes, and I think the argument against banning them proves the case. People say small organizations could not afford to host anyone otherwise — which concedes that the intern is doing work worth paying for. If the position genuinely produces nothing of value, it is not an internship, it is a tour. What I would not do is ban them and stop there, because the predictable result is fewer positions rather than paid ones, and the people who lose out are exactly the ones the ban was meant to help. So it has to come with something — a subsidy for small employers, or a training-wage category. Otherwise you've made a point and made things a bit worse.

The Korean translation, the expression breakdowns, the reusable frames and the common-mistake notes for these four questions are in the book. The recording and this transcript are free, here and on YouTube.