Innocent Interns

Landing up for an internship is the real time when the student actually gets up in the field that he always dreamed of being into. Internship culture has been gaining popularity in the South Asian context anyway. Whether you want to join a bank, or if you want to be a football coach, you can now take an internship, and understand the basics of the firm that you always dreamed of joining.






This gives the opportunity to the student to decide whether he actually can stay happily in this field or not, and if he is not, he can move somewhere else, because gone are the days when one works for money. They work for the happiness and self-satisfaction. Self-satisfaction can be achieved only through the satisfaction of the job. You can never be happy, no matter how much you earn, unless you are happy in your work hours.

The fact should also be understood beforehand that, if they are there to gain something, the company has hired them for some gain as well. Today there are reductions in the number of fully paid employees in banks, because they treat interns as their staff as well. Again, interns cannot be trusted easily, because they can always give an unfair opportunity to a competing firm. So there is a give and take relation in internship as well.

Payment of internship can certainly not be a huge issue, but what counts is the work environment. Maybe everything is well furnished, maybe there is a cooler in the room, and you do have flexible working hours, but an entire office must understand the fact that interns are new to the organization. They have no clue regarding when the lunch break is, or where the wash room is located. The thing that counts is friendly employee behavior. Okay, it is understandable that employees are busy and cannot spend their time on some unknown new interns, but at least the one who took the responsibility of handling the work to interns has to be responsible enough anyway.

Private banks do have special privilege for interns in Nepal. There are banks which even pay, or at least ensure the payment of their snacks during the lunch break in Nepal. Government owned banks may have their own set of ethics anyway. Okay, that can be considered and understood, but what about other sectors besides banking? Production houses, advertising agencies, sales department or other firms? There are places that happily take interns and later don’t even pay for petrol spent for their work.

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A version of this article appears in print on February 16, 2016 of The Himalayan Times