Reasons not to intern

Hehehe, I’m still subscribed to the RSS feeds of Business Week’s MBA Diaries. I started reading these when I first started considering an MBA, way back in mid-2003, and kept on reading them during the course of my MBA experience. I guess they acted as a kind of control group, against which I could check my own progress. I never got round to unsubscribing, although I don’t read them very often these days. I just took a look though, and one of them really got my attention: Rachael Klein on why doing an internship while classes are ongoing is a really bad idea. I totally agree. My own internship spanned a break period and my final semester; it was great, really rewarding, during the holiday but it was a mistake to have let it carry on into term time. It definitely meant that I didn’t get the best experience during my exchange period at Tsinghua, and led to an enormous amount of stress and unpleasantness. Don’t do it unless you really know what you’re doing…