internships

[waxie]

[ QUOTE ]
engineers: Lockheed Martin. you pretty much need to be a rising senior to get your security clearance though. but you do relevant things.

you obviously need to have a very competitive resume to get in.

afterthought: most importantly, i work 4 10 hour days a week, and take fridays off! you can pretty much come in and leave whenever you want, as long as you make it to the team meetings (or at least teleconference in)

[/ QUOTE ]

I have heard from several people that Lockheed is a cool place to do an internship. One of my friends brother's had one and now he has a full-time job there. He makes more money than he knows what to do with.

[waxie]

[ QUOTE ]
I learned a decent amount, but also realized that a lot of management consulting is made up of BS.

[/ QUOTE ]

Little Fishy,

Can you talk a little bit more about this? I've heard the same thing from a lot of different people. My impression of management consultants is that they get paid a lot to apply cookie-cutter solutions to difficult problems. Also, their pay is in no way tied to sucess.

[Little Fishy]

I will definitly elaborate...
first of all there is no accountability in terms of results or methodology. consultants get a big pay check either way, and no one examines the job they do after the fact. what I've seen is that consultants will take methodology and apply it blindly to every situation.

part of my job over the summer was reading through 'research' and consulting methods that other people had already put together. I might read 3 or 4 methods for maximizing productivity in project based organization, each method would be drastically different, but they would all claim to be THE absolute best method. I don't think I read a single work that conceded that it wasn't perfect in all situations. what was even more perplexing was that i was working with MBAs and what not who were applying these techniques in corporations without anyone questioning them!

with management consultanting you get paid for working, you don't get paid for improving a company, a lot of times these firms will be hired by someone trying to cover their ass so that they can say they used consultants, other times it will be to use up a branch's budget so that they will get just as much cash the following quarter, sometimes they really will be hired to help save or improve a company, in all of those cases however i don't think that anyone ever evaluates the job that they do.

it is a really backward industry, a lot of your success in it is saying that you specialize or that you have something to offer that no one else does, this means that there is a lot of incentive to come up with BS methodology and theories that don't really work but that you can sell, there is also a lot of smoothtalking important people.

there was a really good article on all of this in the June edition of Atlantic magazine, I'll see if i can dig it up somewhere.

[mulebennett]

had two internships.

1. small-time weekly newspaper in hometown, sr year of high school, all year, very fun, worked with people i loved and had a great time. they really enjoyed me too, and i use them for business references to this day.

2. athletic department at univ. of md, soph yr of college, one semester, very fun at times but felt like i wasnt totally needed, but great people and i liked it and would do it again. also used for business references.

neither job was paid. beat.

[Little Fishy]

I found that article:

Atlantic Article

[waxie]

[ QUOTE ]
I will definitly elaborate...
first of all there is no accountability in terms of results or methodology. consultants get a big pay check either way, and no one examines the job they do after the fact. what I've seen is that consultants will take methodology and apply it blindly to every situation.

part of my job over the summer was reading through 'research' and consulting methods that other people had already put together. I might read 3 or 4 methods for maximizing productivity in project based organization, each method would be drastically different, but they would all claim to be THE absolute best method. I don't think I read a single work that conceded that it wasn't perfect in all situations. what was even more perplexing was that i was working with MBAs and what not who were applying these techniques in corporations without anyone questioning them!

with management consultanting you get paid for working, you don't get paid for improving a company, a lot of times these firms will be hired by someone trying to cover their ass so that they can say they used consultants, other times it will be to use up a branch's budget so that they will get just as much cash the following quarter, sometimes they really will be hired to help save or improve a company, in all of those cases however i don't think that anyone ever evaluates the job that they do.

it is a really backward industry, a lot of your success in it is saying that you specialize or that you have something to offer that no one else does, this means that there is a lot of incentive to come up with BS methodology and theories that don't really work but that you can sell, there is also a lot of smoothtalking important people.

there was a really good article on all of this in the June edition of Atlantic magazine, I'll see if i can dig it up somewhere.

[/ QUOTE ]

I read that article, it was pretty good.

[Gildwulf]

Imo, internships are a waste of time unless you are in a highly competitive field like business and know exactly what you want to do (i.e. I wanna work in finance so I'm going to work 3 summers at a financial analysis firm).

My alternate path: know a prominent professor really really well, get A's in his classes, see if he can hire you as a research assistant or something, then get mad hookups after college.

[waxie]

[ QUOTE ]
Imo, internships are a waste of time unless you are in a highly competitive field like business and know exactly what you want to do (i.e. I wanna work in finance so I'm going to work 3 summers at a financial analysis firm).

My alternate path: know a prominent professor really really well, get A's in his classes, see if he can hire you as a research assistant or something, then get mad hookups after college.

[/ QUOTE ]

I disagree with this. You can make some serious connections doing internships and those will help once you graduate. I have already gotten a job thanks to an internship and I'm sure that more are on the way.

If you don't know what you want to do, then I think you've got to do internships so you can figure it out. If you have absolutely no idea...well, what are you doing in college?

[Evan]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Imo, internships are a waste of time unless you are in a highly competitive field like business and know exactly what you want to do (i.e. I wanna work in finance so I'm going to work 3 summers at a financial analysis firm).

My alternate path: know a prominent professor really really well, get A's in his classes, see if he can hire you as a research assistant or something, then get mad hookups after college.

[/ QUOTE ]

I disagree with this. You can make some serious connections doing internships and those will help once you graduate. I have already gotten a job thanks to an internship and I'm sure that more are on the way.

If you don't know what you want to do, then I think you've got to do internships so you can figure it out. If you have absolutely no idea...well, what are you doing in college?

[/ QUOTE ]
Yea, I'll go along with this and agree that gildwulf's post is almost completely wrong.

[Gildwulf]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Imo, internships are a waste of time unless you are in a highly competitive field like business and know exactly what you want to do (i.e. I wanna work in finance so I'm going to work 3 summers at a financial analysis firm).

My alternate path: know a prominent professor really really well, get A's in his classes, see if he can hire you as a research assistant or something, then get mad hookups after college.

[/ QUOTE ]

I disagree with this. You can make some serious connections doing internships and those will help once you graduate. I have already gotten a job thanks to an internship and I'm sure that more are on the way.

If you don't know what you want to do, then I think you've got to do internships so you can figure it out. If you have absolutely no idea...well, what are you doing in college?

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm not debating whether or not you can get connections from internships; obviously you can. I'm just saying that spending 4 months in a big city in an unpaid internship (i.e. DC or NYC) would have an opportunity cost of like at least 12k (8k for living expenses, 4k for working an average shmoe job and saving up some money) and you can easily get hookups in other ways that are less expensive. You just have to look harder.