Where are you in your life
I really hate the cliché answer “It depends” but this is one situation where I would definitely use this. Whether you go for Paid or Unpaid internship should purely depend on where you are in your life.
If you are a Freshmen or Sophomore (First or Second Year) you need to put your head down and take whatever opportunity comes to you. Unless you’re a child prodigy, coding since 5th grade with tons of stuff your have build, take the opportunity in front of you.
Obviously, this is tech, they are not going to make you bring coffee, but the more boring task you might get is some data entry or data correction. If that is the case, it is totally up to you on what you do with it. You can simple go forward and do it to get some experience of the professional culture and build some network and talk to those people OR you can find the find ways to improve the process for your tasks (data cleaning) and learn what they have.
My free internship gave me my big break
What is wrong with you? Why would you work for free?
This is what my friend said when we met after my first day of internship. He said he valued his time too much to work for free. I was in my third year, learning Linux and the guy I was learning from, recommended me to ITM Kharghar, a management college that ran everything on Linux and needed someone to fix laptops, build it up with Ubuntu and install the required packages needed for all the students. I did not think much would come off it but took it any way.
I would fix the laptops/desktops, install packages and in my free time, I would learn the tools they were using it. I was also writing at https://geekstarts.tech so I thought I would have some new posts to write. That internship is where I learned Nagios, Squid proxy, NFS, Samba and wrote about them. When Citadel wanted an operations intern, they were looking for someone who has worked a lot on Linux Environment, knew programming and also Web Development and my resume was a perfect match.
So if you get a free internship, ask what your role would be, take it and learn everything about the technologies and tools they are using and build something out of it.
Paid Internship
This is like literally winning the lottery. You’re in college, little to no experience and someone is paying you to work and also at the same time helping you gain valuable experience that will make your job search in the future pretty easy. But remember, if you’re being paid, they’re counting on you to deliver. You can’t be mediocre. You can’t do work to just get by because you’re getting a salary.
They expect you to perform. They are paying for your time so you can do something for them that they are lacking. So the onus is on you, not to just deliver but deliver beyond expectations so they can get you back, for another internship or for a full time job.
The 3 months of summer internship I did, I worked on a couple of Saturdays, worked overtime everyday and was asking everyone questions about stuff I would see. That made my manager give me another internship in my last semester and then a full time offer which I still have right now.
Nobody told me this stuff, I figured it out and this is why I want to share this with you. I want you all students trying to get an internship to not only get a nice paid one but also convert it into a full time offer so you don’t have to apply to other companies, keep giving interviews and have the stress to find a nice job.
Everything would be easy if you know what to do and play your cards right.