The Benefits of Beginning as an Intern

In November 2019, I accepted my offer to become an employee at Summer Consultants beginning the following summer. In January 2020, while I was finishing my undergraduate degree at the University of Delaware, I began working as an intern at the firm, per my request. This proved to be a great decision and provided me with a couple of benefits that have aided me in my first two years full time with the company.

One of the worst feelings as a new full-time employee is the feeling that you are more of a burden on your coworkers than an asset. In starting as an intern several months before beginning full time, I was able to complete all the onboarding and basic training items early on. By graduation, I was proficient in CAD, I had been exposed to several different projects each with different types of systems and was able to experience multiple different on-site surveys. While I was by no means a master at any of these by the end of the internship, I was able to be productive and feel like a valuable part of the Summer Consultants team.

In addition to this, one of the greatest advantages of beginning as an intern prior to starting full-time was the knowledge I gained about the industry itself. Being an engineer presents you with a variety of very different opportunities. It is very common that anyone, but an engineer especially, isn’t sure what career path they want to take coming out of school. My experience as an intern helped solidify that I had chosen the right career path for me and was happy in the industry that I am now in. I was able to move forward to the beginning of my career knowing that I was not only in the right field of work, but also was in a company that has the type of workplace culture and dynamic that I wanted in a job. And now, two years later, as I train an intern myself, I am hopeful that I can help him experience these same benefits that I was able to just two years ago.