Not to take away from the importance of internships or say that you don't have any "experience", but an internship is just to show that you can work well with people and learn. I had internships and have had interns work for the company I work at. I've never really seen an intern do anything that I would consider important, nor do I think it's enough time to learn anything about a company or a career in general. The 3 months you spend in an internship over the summer is the amount of time I spent working in one of our shops learning one type of tool. And that only taught me how it works, not the situational circumstances that can cause it to fail. I'm not trying to tear your experience down at all, it's just an example. But thinking that internships somehow give you more experience may just be the very thing that annoys people with experience.

(And I'm not trying to take the experienced old guy side, because those people annoy the crap out of me even more)

2 ...

Report Post

Posted by DownshiftAndFloorIt

Here

Member since Jan 2011

66763 posts

Posted on 4/9/14 at 9:07 am to KG6

quote:
But thinking that internships somehow give you more experience may just be the very thing that annoys people with experience.

I get what you're saying, but experience is relative. Of course no graduating senior will have the experience of somebody who's been in the trenches for 5 years, and the old guys laugh at the guy who's been out for 5 years saying he's experienced.

As far as engineering students go, I've pulled more weight in the job world than most.

0 ...

Report Post

Posted by Hammertime

Will trade dowsing rod for titties

Member since Jan 2012

43030 posts

Posted on 4/9/14 at 9:11 am to KG6

quote:
foreign engineers are the worst

They were all Indian.

With the job I got after my first degree, I worked with the boss one day, and that was basically it. We had joint efforts on big money deals, but I dealt with the rest. It was pretty humbling that after the first two weeks, I had 3 or 4 different crews with problems that I had to figure out how to solve every single day. Not saying that I didn't mess up, but throwing me to the wolves worked well in that situation.

After going through my first three semesters of engineering at LSU, I feel comfortable saying that none of the students would be able to handle situations where they had to deal with managing people or problems.