The Intern Dilemma
A booming economy doesn’t automatically translate into booming opportunities
“Internship” originally a Western construct meant to give students hands on learning and corporates cheap, unaccounted and untethered labour has quietly morphed into a structural trap. What began as a bridge between academia and employment has become a moat keeping graduates out. Ironically even in global financial hubs like New York, Mumbai, London; sharp finance grads are struggling to land jobs, often forced into six-month “internships” that companies use as cost arbitrage quietly replacing what should have been full time entry level roles
Strip away the corporate niceties and these internships reduce students to contractual labour, rarely integrated with the core team, are given low skill, monotonous work on a flat learning curve and ultimately replaced by the next cohort
So where does the blame really sit?
The Students - Increasingly, the age at which life decisions are made is dropping and the room to pivot gracefully from those keeps shrinking. Imagine being told at 16 that decisions taken now shall set the trajectory for your early adulthood; expected or forced very early on buckle up and take so many decisions regarding stream, grades, college, degree, internships, etc. Only to be then at the mercy of economic slowdowns, technology shifts and whims of global politics when hoping to even commence their career, get an opportunity to prove their mettle. How do they escape the absurd paradox of wanting jobs to earn experience but jobs wanting to hire experienced folks only.
In the West, this paradox pushed people into unpaid internships. In India, it pushes them into endless degrees and courses
Students try overcompensating in mass hysteria amplified by linkedin. They chase degree after degree: CA,CFA, masters followed by certificate courses, seminars and blind networking but mind you every new qualification devalues the one before it.So is it the fault of the degrees or the students? If it’s the degree then what’s the solution?Make it inaccessible, harder? Turn it into an exam few can pass just to preserve the hollow prestige only for the ones who do pass to still end up under-rewarded, creating a painful filter for the same outcomes.
The Corporates - Who have tasted the economics of near free talent and enhanced bottom lines. The model is quite self sustaining and PAT optimised; bring in interns, no training obligation, extract work, no longterm commitment, no benefits, postpone hiring, endless supply and brand illusion to keep the pipeline full.
The leadership gets rewarded for margins not mentorships. Corporates know students will tolerate anything for a brand on their LinkedIn and they will leverage this ruthlessly.
The Academia- Which is still functioning exactly how it was designed for the industrial era, being the only source of “subject related information” where people studied to learn rather to survive.These new-age VC funded colleges aren’t the fix either. They swing to the opposite extreme by treating theory as redundant, pushing shallow job-readiness modules, soft skill emphasis and calling it disruption. Concept building theory are the building blocks to novel ideas and put us a step ahead in the self learning curve, replacing foundational understanding with “lets build a drop shipping business” isn’t genius; it’s short term thinking. Education still has to be learning but at faster pace and with tighter relevance and anchored in the realities of the world we live in. ChatGPT is here to stay, why try to circumvent it and not use it as an Aid to level the playing field for children from all walks of life in terms of democratising knowledge, accelerating learning, personal mentoring, etc.
Nobody had thought that in future the growth of employable youth and growth of white collar jobs would be inversely related due to rampant technological changes.We live in unprecedented times but the key lesson is that Life has never been fair at any point in history.Millennials and Gen Z grew up in a 1st of its kind, window of economic prosperity, technological boom, expanded civil liberties and a global social safety net where growth felt guaranteed and linear. We got accustomed to comfort, predictability and a pancy cocooned life that shielded us from how volatile the world can really be and how it historically had been.
We redesigned the workplace. We redesigned technology. The only thing we never redesigned was education.
The Economy - This has to be laziest argument that somehow gets passed around very conveniently. GDP growth is at a decade high. Corporate top lines are expanding. Profit pools are swelling. Expansion plans are back on the table from new factories in the industrial space to fintech products to IPO pipelines. On the consumption side credit card debt is soaring, concert tickets fly off the shelf in seconds, restraunts have a month long waitlist, malls are inundated with shoppers and new brands. Every CXO chants ‘The India Story’, how this is our decade, some even call it our century. Yet the people meant to inherit this century are struggling, India’s growth right now feels like a pyramid broad at the top, narrow at the base.
Solutions (Rethinking required)
For Academia : Redesign and instill a corporate alike sense of accountability. Most colleges and schools in this country are funded by taxpayer money which we’re expected to return to the system later through our own taxable income. The implicit deal is to educate us well enough to make us employable, and we’ll pay it forward.
But that deal keeps getting broken.
These institutions are plagued by managerial inefficiency, outdated faculty, and zero urgency to adapt. They fail miserably at positioning their students on multiple frontiers; not just for jobs but even for passing exams with relevant real-world understanding. The curriculum is stale, the teaching is rote, the assessment is archaic, and placement cells are more defunct.
I am of the opinion that it should be the schools responsibility to advise students especially in their final grades on which professions or further studies are they best suited for.Not based on grades on who the student has been over the years:on their temperament, curiosity, field acumen, people skills, dispute management, risk appetite of the rebels, verbal sharpness, sportsmanship, cultural activities etc as they have observed us professionally, moulded us from our nascent age of 6 to 16. Nobody has ever credited their success to a last minute aptitude test, to a career counsellor.
If schools can grade us for a decade, they can guide us for the next atleast.
For Students: Its a fast world now, not necessarily a hard one. We are equipped with a plethora of information, tools, online mentors shortcuts, etc. Teenagers hit adulthood earlier than ever;the transformation that once happened at sixteen now starts at thirteen. They are chasing freedom very fast in vanity matters - fashion, makeup, indulgences, in money matters too but without the maturity it demands.
I had read a Dostoevsky quote on how people don’t want freedom because it also calls for accountability of your own thoughts, decisions, consequences of your actions which frightens most. They choose to masquerade their ineptitude under the pretext of luck, job market, politics, parental pressure or the absence of it, college..
All we need to do is nudge accountability in our children, quit coddling them ffs. Stop defending your children and also stop berating them. Let them taste FAFO , disabuse them of the delusion that the world is a fair and forgiving place. Only solution is to internally build a vision for yourself but with due guidance/ research and build steps and goals to reach that place. Thats it
What you do should have a why you do with tangible outcomes.
Tenets 0f Building a Career
I am 21, I work in Private credit and have already worked for a year in investment banking, have had meaningful internships in private wealth management and SaaS sales
Although I have no grand ambitions in my current phase of life to build a career in corporate, it has dawned on me after the time I have spent that if i were to do the same, heres how I’d want to be positioned.
At the confluence of 3 things:
High-quality (often restricted) information + competent, ambitious talent + proximity to money. That’s the trifecta. You’ve got to be near money to make money — or at least be close enough for opportunity to spill in your direction.
My current job and organisation satisfies my checklist and hence I never have a dull day, always excited to be in office, something that feels increasingly rare for my generation.
I write this not just from personal experience but vastly from what I’ve been observing among my peers and from friends spread across very different walks of life, each on their own trajectory and pursuit
Chatgpt was used to only to refine the language, to make it look more presentable and in testing the logic of my assumptions.
If this resonates, do drop a comment