Internships: The Ins and Outs

Two UI Students Experience Internships and Their Long-Term Impacts.

By Clare Gaughan

In the long stretch between semesters, how can UI students productively fill their time?

Being a student is a full-time job, and there’s never a moment when one isn’t preparing for a test, an event, or a project. College is a time for all of us to look ahead to the future and try to determine the best path towards a career or what that career will be. 

What’s truly important is having a job you care about and feeling like you are doing something worthwhile; the hard part is figuring out what that could be. While navigating the job network, students explore internships and opportunities to gain impactful experiences and establish networks.

Take third-year honors student Jessica Benson, for example. During her first year, Benson was unsure of her major or future career, but her internship at the Archaeologists' Office of the State changed everything.

This office is located on the outskirts of campus and it is the center for archeological findings, research, and experiments.

By utilizing the job-finding app Handshake and completing an honest, professional interview process, Benson secured a position. During this internship, she figured out how to manage systems like Excel and Microsoft, filed and organized rock and artifact collections, and learned about the museum system itself.

One key takeaway for Benson was that she was expected to learn on the job. “That was really valuable, because I now know going in that there isn’t an awful lot of training in museums.” 

Benson’s internship inspired her to major in geosciences, and she plans on working in a museum one day to continue her work with collections.

Another internship success can be seen through the experience of Lilly Beth Froelich, a third-year honors biology student who is studying pre-veterinary medicine. She had a research internship with the University of Iowa’s Thorne Toxicology lab during her first year. 

She spent this time researching toxicology and climatology, two subjects she has a lot of interest in. Froelich emphasized that this internship helped her develop her research skills and learn how to work with Microsoft. 

While this internship did not have a direct impact on her future career, as she still plans to become a veterinarian, it was valuable as it increased her knowledge in the field of biology and provided independent work experiences. 

Froelich stated, “I really liked being able to do things hands-on and actually on my own.”

Internships are a great way to experiment with what you are passionate about and see your dreams in reality. They may build new skills or completely change your path if you give them a chance.