Do internships: Take even menial holiday jobs
During my undergraduate days, a lecturer of Economics rained down abuses on the students who had flown to the United Kingdom for holiday employment. His point was that these students readily offered themselves for any jobs, including the ones that undeservedly demean them and jobs they would never have offered themselves to do at home.
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A few years later, I was going to see the limping logic in his reasoning and possibly decipher the real motivation for his unwarranted, almost exaggerated reactions to this simple matter. He might be jealous of the youth who are getting to know their world better by crossing many cultural barriers and attempting to walk the globe as citizens of the world.
If there is any university or polytechnic lecturer who is not daring the undergraduates to travel to work, especially when the latter can afford it, such teacher is wickedly squeezing the horizons of the latter and making them less broadminded and cosmopolitan. If you can afford it, travel and work in many places of the global village; for after all, the world is your community.
The main challenge facing undergraduates in public universities is that the authorities have too many numbers to deal with at one point in time or another. This numbers-challenge is further complicated by the virtual lack of a policy direction regarding internships and holiday employments. In many schools and departments of our public universities, students are not obliged to take internship initiatives.
If you are a student of any of the numerous universities in Ghana, you might want to review your college policy regarding holiday jobs, especially those whose efforts come back to feed into your overall cumulated weighted average. If your school has no such body of policy guidelines, you do not have to take your school to court. You can make use of this seemingly hopeless situation.
Request an introduction letter from your school (and I can imagine how much of a hell you have to go through procuring this simple letter from a public university). Put your request early, way ahead of the heavy traffic often unleashed by the large army of fellow colleagues who wish to take same letter to the British and American embassies.
In well-organised privately run universities, the schools have made it one of their core duties to secure internship placements for their students and to follow up on the progress of their students during and after the employment. The category who believe in turning out mature and independent thinking graduates only facilitate the process by providing adequate inputs and leaving the hunt for the company or institution in the hands of the student-beneficiary.
If you do not fall in the first tier of schools that arrange the entire enterprise, and have to hunt the opportunity yourself, here are a few leads:
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Procure your introduction letter early enough
Jump the traffic by applying ahead of the traffic. The traffic begins when the second semester halves. You can start working on this letter as soon as the first semester ends (It is noteworthy to mention the fact that in some departments in these same public universities, a student can procure an introduction letter in less than 48 hours!). But whatever the speed at which your university’s administration and student support services travel, starting early is bliss.
Apply for the opportunity, officially
It will seem like asking too much from an undergraduate when you suggest that a prospective intern should apply for the vacancy. Our corporate environment in Ghana is not a bedfellow of student’s internships. While multinationals make room for summer employment for students on vacations, a lot of Ghanaian companies find these requests a nuisance.
Applying officially for a vacation employment is a handy way of jumping the queue and leaving the others behind. Requesting officially to be considered for vacation job avails you the opportunity to introduce yourself beyond the boring, stereotype fashion as is typical of college administration correspondences.
When you write, you afford yourself a uniquely rich opportunity to tell the manager who reviews such requests what programme you are taking, the syllabi you have completed and which ones are forthcoming. By the time you are done with this narrative, you are right at the door where you have to make that special case for your request and how considering you positively improves your chances of adding invaluable knowledge to the stocks that you already have.
Applying for the job affords you the right to specify what Ghanaian companies wish to hear: that you will value the opportunity they will offer you, especially in areas of practical knowledge and that you will not make any monetary demands either overtly or covertly.
It is important to mention that the market conditions confronting a lot of the Ghanaian firms are unique. With this unwise liberalisation of trade and the wantonly unthinking opening of our entry points to every kind of goods, local companies have had to quickly reconsider their strategies.
Large manufacturing companies that would have welcomed scores of student interns have virtually traded
such openings with China, from where everything from plastics, chemicals and even a ruthless version of galamsey have come from.
Excel in your duties
When you are offered the first opportunity, prospects for the second, third and subsequent ones are almost a done deal. But be reminded that when on your first internship, the prospects for subsequent chances, and even those of your colleagues in future, depend on the picture you leave behind by the time you are due to return to school.
Being diligent at your duties, making yourself available for assistance, being punctual at post, readying yourself for sacrifices and being efficient at the tasks that have been referred to you are among the qualities that will endear you to the team. This endearment, when properly managed, will birth repeated opportunities that may extend to your being preferred for National Service.
A lot of interns I have had the opportunity to talk to complain about the kind and class of jobs they were assigned during their brief practical. Granted that you are a marketing major student in KNUST Business School, why should an advertising firm involve you so much to the point of giving you an account to manage, even if that account is new and minor?
Take any opportunity availed you by the host company. Even if such opportunities do not readily seem like they can add anything to your current real stock of knowledge, as is often the case in life, you will need that classless kind of knowledge someday. — GB