Gen Y Speaks: Why I took time off school to continue my internship

The new academic year at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) started on Tuesday (Aug 13). My classmates were all back in school, but I was not.

This is because I decided to take a leave of absence from school for a semester to extend my internship with TODAY as a reporter. 

My parents were taken aback when I first told them my plans. They were worried that it was the first step of me dropping out of university.

But taking a gap semester has caught on among undergraduates: Some do so for mental health reasons, others to travel and “find themselves”, but mostly, they are taken to complete internships.  

I had asked around, weighing the pros and cons, and discussing the matter with friends and acquaintances who had done so, before deciding.

Take, for instance, my friend Theodore, a business undergraduate at NTU, who took a gap semester to complete a six-month internship at a major firm. 

Like me, he does not have a semester-long internship requirement in his curriculum. Landing a job in the finance sector as an average B student will not be an easy feat, he explained, so he is banking on beefing up his resume with internship experience. 

I feel the same way. Having entered both polytechnic and university through discretionary admissions, I learnt young and fast the importance of work experience. 

Since I started my university education in NTU, I have spent all my summer breaks completing internships.

My friends and I would be searching online for internship placements and job offers a couple of months before the school holidays. 

But because of the need to be back at school for the start of the academic year, these internships felt short at six to eight weeks.

Indeed, my internship with TODAY was supposed to last eight weeks.

However, a couple of weeks into my internship, it seemed that taking a gap semester would be a natural next step for me.

It was simple really: I knew that I wanted to pursue journalism as a full-time career but I wanted to find a newsroom that would be the right fit for me. 

Since I’ve joined TODAY, I’ve been entrusted to report and write on different news subjects, from crime to politics to business. For a 22-year-old, this is all very exciting, the stuff that dreams are made of. 

In the newsroom, I am treated like a full-time reporter, with almost the same expectations, workload and responsibilities, similar to my previous experiences working in a newsroom. 

I had been an intern at only one newsroom before TODAY, returning at the other newsroom every chance I could since I first joined that team as a wide-eyed, final-year Ngee Ann Polytechnic Mass Communication student. 

Through my previous internship, I learnt the importance of forging real relationships with my colleagues and how much more I could stand to gain from staying on in a single workplace than, say, jumping around as most of my friends have done. 

That was when I started to seriously consider taking a gap semester. 

But as with any decision, there were tradeoffs as well. 

First, I would have to go through another round of making new friends in class when I return to school. 

Second, as pointed out by a colleague, graduating later would also mean a loss in income, albeit for just a few months.

What swayed it for me was that most of my friends who have recently graduated landed full-time jobs at the same places where they interned.

It had made sense to them and their bosses. They enjoyed their time as an intern and got to know their colleagues well, so returning as a full-timer was a win-win situation for both employers and employees. 

Most undergraduates have caught on and are aware that internships have become a stepping stone to landing a full-time job. This later became my strongest argument when convincing my parents on why I should extend my internship. 

They were sitting on the fence at first, but this helped me to finally seal the deal. 

A gap semester also isn’t the only way. A friend of mine was an intern at the same workplace for seven years, from his polytechnic days up to when he graduated from university. It was no surprise when he was offered a full-time position upon graduation. 

But not everyone is as lucky as he was, to have found what they wanted to do at such an early age. 

With graduation just around the corner and as I take a step closer to adulthood, I am forced to think about what I want waiting for me at the finish line. 

The world beyond school is a daunting one, with so many big decisions and plans that are supposed to have already been made by now. A gap semester will allow me to be able to do what almost every undergrad I know wants to do: Hit the pause button.

In the hustle and bustle of university life, it is not often that we are given the time to reflect and think about the things that we want from our degree. 

Sometimes the time away from school could do us good and help us understand why we learn the things we do in school, or even serve as a reminder on why we opted to pursue a degree in the first place. 

Being in university is probably going to be my last four years as a student, since I haven’t made any plans to get a Masters or PhD, and it is something I want to enjoy in the present, rather than with hindsight. 

A four-month delay is but a small hiccup in the grand scheme of things. I’m not in a hurry to get anywhere yet and all that matters to me right now is how I am going to get to where I want to be. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Kimberly Lim is studying Public Policy and Global Affairs, with a second major in English Literature, at Nanyang Technological University. She will start her third year in her four-year course in January 2020 when she completes her internship at TODAY.