“Get an internship.”
That’s the most common piece of advice handed to students chasing career success. Advisers, professors and parents all say the same thing: If you want to be competitive in the job market, you need internships stacked on your resume. These often one- or two-month job experiences are sold as the golden ticket to real-world experience, proof that you’ve stepped outside the classroom and into the professional world.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: An internship doesn’t always equal experience. Sometimes, it’s just a summer spent stapling papers, “shadowing” meetings or handling tasks that no one else on the team wanted. It all looks polished on LinkedIn, but the reality can feel more like unpaid labor dressed up with a corporate logo.
The problem isn’t internships themselves; it is how we’ve inflated what they represent. The very word “internship” has become shorthand for competence. A single line on a resume signals skills, knowledge and readiness for the workforce. Yet, the quality of these roles varies wildly. Sitting in on endless Zoom calls isn’t the same as contributing to strategy. Copy-pasting data into a spreadsheet isn’t the same as analyzing it. And shadowing someone’s day-to-day doesn’t guarantee you’ll understand the job, let alone be prepared to do it yourself.
Of course, there are excellent internships that deliver on their promise. They give students ownership of projects, space to make mistakes and exposure to challenges that will help their thinking in the long run. In those cases, students walk away with more than bullet points — they walk away with confidence and clarity about their future. But those roles aren’t universal. Too often, interns are treated like placeholders: useful enough to handle tedious work but not trusted with anything that carries weight.
Companies are partly to blame. For many, internships function less as learning opportunities and more as pipelines. They’re cheap labor in exchange for brand prestige. They are a way to claim that they’re “investing in young talent” without truly doing the work of training. A polished internship program may look good in recruiting brochures, but too many firms overlook whether interns actually leave with real skills.
Students, too, play into the cycle. The scramble for internships is intense, and sometimes, it doesn’t matter what the role is as long as it can be dressed up in resume language. Even the most mundane tasks can be reframed with the right buzzwords and statistics. “Supported cross-functional projects and collaborated with a team of 10-plus members” might really mean “took notes during a meeting with 10 people.” “Analyzed market data” might mean “entered survey results into Excel.” It’s not lying, but it’s certainly stretching.
Students also inflate their internship accomplishments because employers expect it. Recruiters scan for familiar company names before they read the details, treating the internship itself as proof of competence. This pressure pushes students to chase any opportunity that looks good on paper, even if the work is shallow and limited to grabbing coffee for full-time employees. It creates a feedback loop: Employers want interns with “experience,” but what they’re really screening for is brand recognition, not actual skills. That makes the whole system less about learning and more about signaling, which misses the point entirely.
Maybe the question we should be asking isn’t “Did you intern?” but, “What did you actually do?” Did you get the chance to lead a project, or were you just cc’d on the emails?
At Northeastern, co-op is the bigger, flashier sibling of internships. Those experiences often deliver more substantial work and longer timelines, but students can fall into the same trap: valuing titles and LinkedIn posts over real growth. Whether it’s an internship or a co-op, the core issue remains: Experience should be measured by what you actually did, not just the brand name on your resume.
When the win is the post and not the project, we drift toward safe work that photographs well and away from messy work that actually teaches you something.
There’s also a broader cultural issue here: We’ve made internships feel mandatory, not optional. Students are pressured to line up one internship experience after another, even if the roles don’t fit their goals or offer real growth. The result is a generation of young professionals with resumes full of impressive titles but uneven skills. Companies then wonder why new hires need so much training. They forget that they never allowed interns to build muscle in the first place.
The fix isn’t simple, but it starts with honesty. Employers need to stop overselling shallow programs as “career-building.” If an intern is mainly doing administrative work, then call it what it is: an introduction to the workplace, not a crash course in leadership. At the same time, schools should emphasize quality over quantity. One meaningful internship where you actually contribute is worth more than three where you barely remember what you did.
Students also have to shift how we evaluate opportunities. Instead of asking, “Does this role look good on my resume?” we should ask, “Will this role teach me something I can’t learn in class?” Now, that filter is harder to apply on LinkedIn, but it’s the difference between chasing prestige and building skills.
Experience can come from all kinds of places: leading a student club, working a part-time job, running a side hustle or even pursuing independent projects. All of these can teach responsibility, communication and problem-solving, the same traits employers claim they want. We just don’t value them the same way we do internships.
Not all internships are created equal. Some will change the way you think and set you up for future success. Others will leave you with nothing but a stack of name tags and a few bullet points you have to overinflate. The challenge is telling the difference before you sign on.
Sana is a second-year business administration major. Sana can be reached at [email protected]
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