Take an unpaid internship with a startup By: Jun Loayza
Under: Now What?, UndergraduateStudents usually take the wrong approach when they begin to think about searching for an internship. The typical student looks for an internship that is paid, structured, and with a well known, brand-name company. While having a brand-name company on your resume can help you get a job during your full-time recruitment, I feel that the internship is an opportunity to try something completely out of left field and that will expose you to something drastically unique.
Structured vs Unstructured
A structured internship is drastically different from an unstructured internship. The majority of corporate, big-name jobs will give you a structured internship where your every move is calculated and pretty much laid out in front of you. You do not have to make any big decisions as far as your career development. So what personal skill-sets do you improve while working at a structured internship? You learn how to follow guidelines, take orders, and do the grunt work. The great thing about structured internships is that they have specific training programs where you can easily learn software skills such as excel, access, or photoshop. The structured internship trains people to go from A to B through steps 1,2, and 3.
Startup companies will give you an unstructured internship. This means that you will have large responsibilities and have to make key decisions on your own. The personal skill-sets that you will develop are leadership, decision making, out-of-the-box thinking, creativity, and problem solving. If you like to be fed your objectives and do not like to make big decisions on your own, then unstructured internships are not for you. You will in essence gain the ability to go from A to B in the most efficient and effective way that you can think of.
Brand Name vs Small Startup
The Brand Name company will always look good on your resume. It is a fact that recruiters will quickly scan your resume and will give you positive points if they see a recognizable name as a past experience. On the other hand, small startup companies will not draw the recruiter’s attention. So what is the benefit of having a small startup company on your resume?
The difference will be the quality in your experience and the amount of value that you will bring to the company. When you are in a brand name company, you are but 1 out of thousands of employees that the company has. If you don’t do the work, someone else will pick up your slack; if you go above and beyond what is expected of you, your managers may not notice because of the sheer size of the company. When you are in a startup company, you are 1 of maybe 10 people. Every single thing that you do will create great value for the company. The founders of the company will definitely notice your sheer hard work and you will be rewarded with letters of recommendation, greater responsibility, and maybe even stock-options or equity. Your resume should tell the reader how you create value for a company. If you worked at a startup, everything that you did created value for the company and your resume will reflect that.
Paid vs Unpaid
I feel that you ultimately have to figure out the reason you are getting an internship. Are you getting an internship for the money or for the experience? Startups without the capital the compensate you with money can offer you many other great benefits: letters of recommendation, company perks, and stock options. If the company makes it big, you can benefit by writing on your resume that you were a significant contributor to the rise of the company. You have all your life to start working for money; take the time now to experiment and gain some valuable experience that a corporate job could never give you.
I feel that unpaid internships with startups are much more valuable that corporate internships because startups compensate you with hands-on experience. Take a chance and go out there and find a startup company. Who knows, you may just come out of there an entrepreneur.
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