Students on international internships need to adapt to a new culture, which requires good listening.There comes a time in everyone’s life when they have to address the age-old question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” As a child, it’s easy to pick all the awesome jobs such as the president, an astronaut, or a rock star. However, for a college graduate, it turns out that a dream job may be more difficult to achieve than originally thought.
Being an undergraduate student, I will need to make a career decision very soon. In order to become a marketable candidate and rise above the competition, I decided to attend an international internship in Kyiv, Ukraine. Below, I discuss my personal experience, an employer’s perspective, and the experience of fellow interns to address the relevancy of international internships to a company’s success.
When college graduates apply for jobs, John Houston, MTG Consulting senior vice-president, states that he looks for ‘generalists’ that have a broad background in many different fields. He expresses that an excellent way for students to show their versatility is to have international experience. Houston assumes that if a person has been abroad, they have ‘cultural sensitivity built in’ and could potentially help the company succeed in a different country.
As US companies invest in Asia and Europe, universities have taken note that many business leaders hold a similar view to Houston’s. So it is not uncommon to find study abroad programmes at the university level. On top of that, US universities often require their students to take part in an internship because it provides valuable work experience. Prestigious universities have recently combined these two ideas to form international internships.
In The Last Lecture, the late Randy Pausch, professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, the US, describes the head fake as a secret message or purpose behind the most obvious one. Using football as an example, he explains that the hidden goal of the game is to teach children teamwork, sportsmanship, and perseverance, not just the rules of the sport. Like football, international internships are filled with many head fakes, skills learned indirectly, that not only demonstrate a graduate’s familiarity with cultural sensitivity but also impress employers. International interns obviously learn concrete knowledge from their internship; however, hidden skills include innovative problem solving, resilience, and the ability to adapt.
An international internship is a 24-hour job with constant barriers
Unlike a local internship where an intern faces obstacles from nine to five at the work place, an international internship is a 24-hour job with constant barriers. In a country where the language and currency may be foreign to a student from the United States, such as Ukraine, even going to the grocery store could be a daunting task. Making a new form of sign language or relying on Google Translate to complete a thought may seem goofy at first, but there is something to be said about innovatively overcoming difficulties. Students on international internships need to adapt to a new culture, which requires good listening.
The misconception about good listening is that it only involves hearing. Good listening though is about paying attention, taking things in, and understanding them. When it comes to international internships, students learn good listening just by living in a foreign country. They adapt to fit cultural norms. US firms need this kind of experience because it parallels what they do when entering a foreign market.
When McDonalds entered India’s market, they had trouble making a return on their investment. But after listening to customer needs, it adapted its menu to fit the country’s largely vegetarian palate. While students on local internships only learn how to do tasks on the job, an international intern’s listening skills make them better suited to work for a global firm. By living in a different country, international interns recognise the existence of cultural barriers and the importance of adapting to fit in. This may seem like a fairly easy skill to learn, but in the business world where time is money, international interns are more efficient as they more readily accept change.
In 2012, Joe Dinardo, a 2013 graduate of Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, interned for the Indian-based company, Apollo Tyres. He said that, when attending job interviews, a hiring manager often gets excited about what Dinardo gained from his international internship asking, “So India! What was that like?” After his time in India, Dinardo not only felt like he had a better understanding of people but was also able to discuss the Forecasting Accurate report he made to improve Apollo Tyres’ efficiency. Dinardo’s internship made him a more marketable person and he felt prepared to work both with a diverse team or setting in the future.
Thousands of students graduate from US universities each year with the same degree and similar knowledge. Of course, GPA, a numerical measure of a student’s performance in school, says something about a person’s work ethic, but it has nothing to do with creative potential. Houston says universities “would be would be missing out by not seeing the business trend of globalisation and need to offer more international internships as a way to address it”.
While most US tend to hold an ethnocentric view, operating in the global market needs students who are familiar with businesses around the world. Unfortunately, local internships cannot teach this vital knowledge. However, by allowing students to dive in and be immersed in a foreign business, international internships can. An international internship is a win-win because not only do students flourish from actively working in a different country but, when they return to America, businesses can also capitalise on what the student has learned.