Thoughts on Industrial Attachment/Internship

I have always thought that people are just claiming that Industrial Attachment/Internship is a good part of your university process because it exposes you to the working world but it might not offer much of a good working experience due to the negative experiences shared by others about their internship life. A few examples include those mundane work like photocopying and things that do not teach you much about the company or the industry that you will be in. However, after going through at least half of my internship, I realise I have gained much from my company.

My company deals with product design and the department that I work with develops the mechanical part of the products. When I started university, I thought that doing product design and development will be very interesting due to the fact that you will be able to use your imaginations to create products and hopefully not much restrictions will be placed on you. Imagine developing the next cool thing such as an IPhone. However, I realise the product development part is not as glamourous as I thought due to the need for a lot of qualification to pass some standards to suit the needs of the consumers and also to ensure that the products do not break down easily. Hence, after the initial design phase, a lot of time is spent on testing where it is really mundane and time consuming. Furthermore, due to the large size of the company, softwares are used to ensure that the products have a certain structure to them so as to ensure everyone conform to the same standards, but that also meant more administrative work has to be done. However, being a sort of large company, they have a lot of good practices such as proper documentation so that the future new workers or other colleagues will be able to pick up the problems and solutions faced by other people. In addition, you get to see how they work together with different departments but another flaw is the seemingly endless amount of meetings that the employees have to attend, reducing their producitivity.

Coming back to my point, going through this internship made me reconsider my choice of joining the product development route as the amount of administrative work and tests are mind numbing. All of the sudden, I realised that I do not know what I want to do in life in the future again. Do I want to continue in the field of product development? Do I still want to continue doing mechanical work? I am not so sure anymore