A Study on Intern’s Experience and Struggle during Internship

Abstract

This article conveys about the internship, its types, and the intern\'s experience and struggles. The major problems to be found are the language barrier, relationship between co-workers, partiality, and so on. One of the ways to overcome the basic struggle is to be flexible with others and try to adapt to the environment that an intern works in.

Introduction

I. INTRODUCTION

An internship is a professional learning experience that offers meaningful, practical work related to a student’s field of study or career interest.

Internship can be also explained as the position of a student or trainee who works in an organization, sometimes without pay, in order to gain work experience or satisfy requirements for a qualification.

An internship is a period of work experience offered by an organization for a limited period of time. They are typically undertaken by students and graduates looking to gain relevant skills and experience in a particular field.

A chartered accounting internship is ideal for a commerce student if they love numbers. In this internship, their responsibilities would be to prepare and maintain financial records and work on essential accounting functions. This internship would help clarify career goals, offer them work experience, and give job leads.

II. STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

The purpose of this research is identifying the difficulties and the experiences of the interns during their internship. Some of the problems that the intern’s went through are like language adoption, supervision of higher authorities, lack of knowledge and experience and so on.

III. OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

1. To bring out the challenges that every intern faces during internship.
2. To know whether all the interns do the work related to their core subject studied.
3. To know the steps that are to be taken in order to build up a strong work experience.
4. To understand the Impact of Internships on Regular studies
5. To explore the satisfaction level and to examine the changes in the attitude changes because of the internship experience.  

IV. SCOPE OF THE STUDY

This study covers the factors like satisfaction level of interns who do internships for their benefits accordingly.This study also states the difficulties faced by the interns during their internships.

V. METHODOLOGY OF THE STUDY

The study is intended to analyse the experience and struggles faced by the interns during internship in Coimbatore city.

The methodology of the study includes 

A. Area of the study

The area of the study is confined to Coimbatore City.

B. Source of data

The study uses only primary data confined questionnaires that have been prepared and collected from various consumers. The Primary research is done to gather original data required for the research. The research is focused on both Qualitative and Quantitative issues. The Secondary data are collected from websites, books, journals, etc. 

C. Sample Size

135 samples have been collected with the help of 25 questionnaires from different consumers. Convenient Sampling method is applied. 

D. Statistical Tool Used

1. Ranking Analysis  
2. Weighted Average Score Method  

VI. LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY

1. This study is limited to Coimbatore city.
2. The duration of the study covers only 6 months.
3. The study is purely based on both primary and secondary data.
4. The study is restricted to the students and workers who are intended to do internships.

VII. REVIEW OF LITERATURE

1. Sawania, Y et.al (2016)[1] presented the most prominent internship in Commerce discipline comparison of accounting, finance, marketing, business and tax. Accounting internships specialize in tax and audit. In the case of Big 4 firms, the interns require professional knowledge. Majority of the employers were satisfied with the students while some conveyed the inability of the interns in the technical report preparation and idea communication. There can be lots of influence in the work like ragging and bullying which at times cannot be prevented as the seniors have more liberty of using interns and juniors for their purpose.
2. Andrew Cannon &Mark J. Arnold, 2016[2] Student Expectations of Collegiate Internship Programs in Business study-J  stated the findings of this research that students have adopted a significantly more pragmatic orientation to college internship programs in business. Students were increasingly seeing the internship less as a vehicle for augmenting their education, and more as a means of gaining a competitive edge in the marketplace for new jobs. Business schools should accordingly ensure that the strategic focus of their internship programs reflects the reality of today's employment market and what students expect from such programs. They should strongly consider allocating additional resources to internship programs, improving program flexibility, and further encouraging student participation.
3. Prakash Kumar Gautam, 2017[3].Satisfaction and Behavioral Intention from Internship Program : A Perceptual Survey From Hotel Management Students,  His study concluded that the majority of the students were satisfied with the intern opportunity and hence they wish to join the hotel industry. The study has observed a low but positive and significant relationship with satisfaction and intention of changing attitude. The study has also explored the fact that there is no gender influence in the satisfaction level of the intern students but male students were prone to change on behavioral intention. Students were positive regarding their career choice but were fond of developing a negative attitude towards college management as well as in-college activities.
4. Ssenjovu Saul in 2018[4] gave a report on fieldwork attachment carried out at Nansana municipal council headquarters. While undertaking the internship training, the intern was inevitably faced by a number of challenges, issues and limitations arising from different causes and sources. The major challenges and limitations of the internship program will be enlisted and categorized under personal, institutional, community, work group and teamwork and technical challenges or limitations. There were many skills that can be learned and which were very important when the exact professional work starts like analytical skills, value of patience, flexibility at work, value of humility, time conscience and so on.
5. Manjit Biant in 2019[5] analyzed the differences among ‘Student Perceptions and Motivations of Formal and Informal Accounting and Finance Internships at UWTSD’. Responses were recorded using Inductive reasoning, Qualitative research method, open-ended interview method, where the students were grouped into two. There were similarities and differences among the groups but they undertook the internship to have hands-on experience to improve their employability prospects. This research found that being a real accountant is far different from the accountant in textbooks.

A. Research Gap

The previous studies have covered the fact that the textbook learnings are far from the real work experience, but this study covers the factors to improve the working experience to have better knowledge about the job and its role. Many projects have discussed the struggles faced by the interns, but not so many have discussed the satisfaction about the internship. So, this research intends to concentrate on both satisfaction and struggles faced by the interns.  

VIII. ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION OF DATA

Analysis and interpretation of data is the process of assigning meaning to collected information and determining the conclusion, significance and implication of the findings. It is an important and exciting step in the process of research. Analysis of data is a process of inspecting, cleansing, transforming and modelling data with the goal of discovering useful information, informing conclusion and supporting decision-making. Data analysis is a process for obtaining raw data and converting it into information useful for decision making buyers. Data are collected and analysed to answer questions, test hypotheses or disprove theories.  

Statistician John Tukey defined Data analysis as “Procedure for analysing data, techniques for interpreting the results of such procedures, ways of planning the gathering of data to make its analysis easier, more precise or more accurate, and all the machinery and results of statistics which apply to analysing data”.

C. Rank Analysis

A Ranking is a relationship between a set of items such that, for any two items, the first is either ‘ranked higher than,’ ‘ranked lower than’ or ‘ranked equal to;’ the second. In mathematics, this is known as a weak order or total pre order of objects. It is not necessarily a total order of objects because two different objects can have the same ranking. The rankings themselves are totally ordered. For example, materials are totally reordered by hardness, while degrees of hardness are totally ordered. 

By reducing detailed measures to a sequence of ordinal numbers, rankings make it possible to evaluate complex information according to certain criteria. Thus, for example, an Internet search engine may rank the pages it finds according to an estimation of their relevance, making it possible for the user quickly to select the pages they are likely to want to see. Analysis of data obtained by ranking commonly requires non-parametric statistics.

Table no. 6

Table showing the relationship between the respondents and their colleagues during internship.

Source: Primary data

• Interpretation: The above table shows supportive and comfortable relationship ranking between respondents and their colleagues. The majority of the respondents stated that their relationship was moderate as it was not so comfortable and the colleagues were not that much supportive. The next ranking order states that the relationship was good and then followed by bad relationship, very good relationship and the least opted option was the very bad relationship.

IX. FINDINGS AND SUGGESTIONS

The Objective of the study was to know about the experience, struggles and  knowledge of internship. This study measures the overall satisfaction of interns of internship in Coimbatore city. The study has been analysed using Percentage analysis, weighted average score analysis, Rank analysis. The final chapter is an attempt to summarize the findings of the study based on which few suggestions have been made.  

1. Percentage Analysis 

• 45.2% of the respondents learnt communication during internship.
• 45.9% of the respondents stated that internship learning totally matches with textbook learnings.
• 33.3% of the respondents stated that lack of knowledge is the major disadvantage.
•  37.8% of the respondents made notes to manage internships with their routine.

2. Weighted Average Score Analysis  

Support from seniors ranked first for the satisfaction of the respondents in few factors after completing their internship which shows that the respondents are more satisfied with that and then followed by Office atmosphere, Work experience, Self development, Practical skills and the least satisfied factor from the opinion of the respondents is the Certificate they provided after completing their internship.

3. Rank Analysis  

The majority of the respondents stated their relationship with the colleagues was moderate as it was not so comfortable and the colleagues were not that much supportive too and then by ranking order it states that the relationship was good and then followed by bad relationship, very good relationship and the least opted option was the very bad relationship option. 

???????A. Suggestions

The relationship between the colleagues and interns should be improved. The practical skills vary with the book knowledge. So it should be updated. Right amount of training should be provided when an intern goes for an internship. The certificates provided at the completion of the internship should be more valued.The teamwork, coordination thoughts should be improved in the minds of interns. The lack of knowledge for the work should not exist.  The duration of the internship should be increased to learn more about the work. The work experience should be in a way that the interns think of continuing that work as their full time job. The work experience should be more resourceful to the interns. The language barrier should not be present during the internship. The dominance of the senior colleagues should not be present. The superiors should not assign the work to the interns which is not related to their core work opted. The interns should learn to manage the internship and their studied/routine work simultaneously.

B. Conclusion

This study helped to learn more about internships. This study elaborated the experiences and the struggles faced by the interns during their internship. This study gave me a wide knowledge about how internships work. This research has elucidated on the working environment experienced by the interns that can pave way to understand the merits and demerits of work ethics, so that they can prepare themself to overcome the exertion of work by balancing both job and studies simultaneously which will also improve the skill of multitasking and teamwork which is absolutely needed in present environment.

X. ANNEXURE

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References

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Copyright

Copyright © 2023 Mrs. Shruthi. P. R., Ms. Atchaya B . This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.