The educational value of hands-on internships

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It was an odd feeling when I drove into Mount Pleasant on Remus Road last week.

I was taking an unusual route back to school from the west side of the state for one thing, rather than from metro Detroit.

But perhaps the oddest part were those feelings of suddenly being a student again — excitement for what lays ahead in campus news, dread for taking classes again and a surreal observance of my surroundings, which I hadn’t seen for what felt like an eternity.

Then again, I was gone for not only the summer, but all of 2010 up to this point. When I took the spring off for a newspaper internship with the Jackson Citizen Patriot, I left campus with the impression I would be back for the summer semester. Instead, I found myself at the Musekegon Chronicle for another internship experience.

And what an experience those eight months were.

You hear professors in every department rave about the value these internships will bring you. Honestly, I never saw myself doing one.

Over the course of this year, I’ve been asked by friends and family if it was really worth delaying my graduation to commit to not just one, but two internships. I decided, somewhat hesitantly, to deliberately throw the four-year plan out the window.

People, you will learn more from these professional experiences than you will in any classroom on campus.

You won’t just make copies. You won’t just fetch coffee for your boss. It’s the real deal — you’re treated just like any other co-worker.

Being a reporter in a professional newsroom with people who have been writing and editing for decades is an incredible treat. It would have been well-worth it even if I hadn’t been paid.

In the classroom, professors talk, you write papers, you take exams. Rinse and repeat.

On the other hand, I was working on a different assignment and traveled to a different location almost every day in Jackson and Muskegon.

Interning in different places — on my own and far away from home — was scary at first, but I’d recommend it to just about anyone. Home is nice, but it’s so much more rewarding to travel elsewhere, get outside your comfort zone and milk the most out of the few months you’re there.

For now, I’m back in Mount Pleasant with a newly developed passion for my field of study. That makes me all the more eager to graduate, even if it’s a semester or two late.