Beyond the Ivory Tower

How Internships Can Open Doors for New Careers

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines An Academic in America On Stupidity, Part 2 Exactly how should we teach the 'digital natives'? First Person Polished Applications Nothing stunts civility like graduate-student insecurities and competition. gift. Career News Fish in the Shallows Stanley Fish would like professors to impart knowledge without viewpoint. Even if that were possible, it would be undesirable. gift. First Person The Welcome Mat On his first day on the job, an assistant professor is handed an unusual gift. Resource Salaries: Faculty | Administrative Presidential pay: Private | Public Financial resources: Salary and cost-of-living calculators Career resources: Academic | Nonacademic Library: Previous articles by topic | by date | by column Career Talk, Ms. Mentor, and more... Landing your first job On the tenure track Mid-career and on Administrative careers Nonacademic careers for Ph.D.'s Talk about your career Blogs

By Robin Wagner

Where might an Egyptologist be spending the summer after the second year of graduate school? Perhaps an archaeological dig? Studying languages? Or doing research at a museum?

Interning at a technology-consulting firm would not be a likely guess. Yet that is exactly where Gregory Menvielle, a graduate student in Near Eastern languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago, is spending his summer.

"If you're only in academics with no experience of the real world," Mr. Menvielle explains, "you may not know what you're missing." Mr. Menvielle chose to take this summer, during which there were not many opportunities for him academically, to "get a grasp on what was going on in the real world." The company sponsoring his internship, Tigris, is a technology-consulting company small enough for him to have a significant impact during the summer.

By working on a programming project, he is building upon skills and training he gained from his undergraduate studies in economics and computer science and from his year's work experience at an Internet consulting company.

While Mr. Menvielle's significant computer skills may be unusual for a humanities Ph.D. student, his desire for a "real world" experience is advisable for graduate students across all disciplines. Internships, both paid and unpaid, are excellent ways to develop new skills, enhance or deepen academic interests, and explore possible career paths.

While internships are common experiences for professional students in programs like law, business, and social work, they are rarely an integral part of graduate training in the arts and sciences. However, those arts-and-sciences graduate students who find such opportunities often are richly rewarded.

Internships are especially valuable for opening up doors in competitive fields with fewer openings. Nikolai Vargas has been working at an unpaid internship since the spring at the Jane Jordan Browne literary agency. While there is some low-level work involved, he says that he gets to do much of the same work as the full-time literary agents in his office. He reviews query letters from authors, reads and edits their manuscripts, and helps the agency decide whether to represent authors. He will soon begin pitching to publishers a manuscript he identified.

Even though his internship is unpaid, "they make you feel like it's a job," he says. "I have real responsibilities, and I always want to come in." Finding time for an internship was hectic with his full course load for a master's degree in humanities, but he was motivated by his keen interest in the field.

One challenge facing arts-and-sciences graduate students is the concern that their advisers will not approve of internships. Scientists especially are concerned that their academic advisers -- often their "boss" in a lab -- will not allow them to take the time off.

Joe Plewa, a physics Ph.D. student at Chicago, acknowledges that his two internships have slowed his progress toward the degree a bit, but stresses that his experiences were worthwhile both for him and even for his laboratory. Furthermore, as he is now finishing up his degree, he enjoys the enviable position of having several options to consider, including academic research, industry research, and business opportunities.

One of his internships grew out of a research presentation at the university by scientists from Continental Plastic Containers Corporation. Since Mr. Plewa works with polymers, he thought this company had "good science puzzles," and he had ideas about how to approach their research problems. His research for the company has been well-regarded by his supervisors, and even led him to additional consulting work with contacts he made during the internship.

As for persuading his adviser to let him have the time away from the lab, Mr. Plewa explains that "enlightened self-interest" is a great strategy, especially in the sciences. In other words, since he would still be working in a related research area, he and his adviser both benefited from the collaboration with the company. Benefits for his adviser's lab included shared use of equipment and expertise as well as potential grant opportunities and research insights to be gained by the access to an industry research environment.

Science is not the only area that can lend itself to internships directly related to research interests. A Ph.D. student in Romance languages and literatures, of all fields, will soon spend several months with a human-rights organization in Argentina through an internship sponsored by the human-rights program at Chicago. Janis Breckenridge is currently researching and writing a dissertation titled "The Representation of Violence and the Violence of Representation: Latin American Women Novelists Writing Against the State."

Ms. Breckenridge was eager to complement her academic research with "more direct, personal involvement" in her subject area. "Working with a committed, grass-roots organization will increase my understanding and appreciation of the texts I study and also give me exposure to the perspectives of those struggling for redress and restitution," she explains. She also found additional sponsorship for her travel from a private patron involved in human-rights activism. It is not always easy to find this kind of support, but it is possible if you invest some time and effort networking in your field.

Whether an internship experience is relevant to one's academic research or not, it remains the best way for a student at any stage in his or her studies to learn about a potential career. However, it can slow down progress toward a degree, and it may not even come with a salary. Mr. Vargas advises students considering an internship to make sure it's in a field they are really interested in. "Don't commit to anything where you'd be taken advantage of, because it wouldn't be worth sacrificing the time from your academics," he says.

Graduate students who have held internships may well pursue academic careers at the completion of their Ph.D.'s, but they will also have open to them contacts and opportunities outside of academics. That alone will allow them to approach the academic job market with an informed understanding of their career options, and therefore without the desperation that some candidates experience.

Andrew Grant-Thomas, a Ph.D. student in political science at Chicago, says he had always questioned how close a fit an academic career would be for him, yet he had seen few models of political scientists working outside of the academy. After two summer internships working on research teams at the RAND Corporation though, Mr. Grant-Thomas is now looking more broadly at his job-search prospects.

"RAND opened my eyes up to other possibilities, with very different research agendas and timelines," he says. He found applied interdisciplinary research very appealing, and is now considering foundations and think tanks in his job search. "It's really great for any Ph.D. students to do stuff that's policy-relevant."

And as for the Egyptologist who doubles as a technology and business consultant, Mr. Menvielle says that he'll decide what to do with his Ph.D. later: "If teaching is the only end for it, then I may reconsider an academic career."

Note: Margaret Newhouse is on sabbatical.

ALSO SEE:

A guide to resources on internships