Internships offer real-world experience

Gone are the days of interns fetching coffee. Instead, they’re gaining real-world experience: taking on duties such as developing treatment plans for people with disabilities, creating medical databases in Guatemala and shadowing police officers. Often all before college graduation.

“It’s something none of my friends have seen,” said Carlos Dominguez, who interned at the Miami-Dade Police Department in Florida last summer. “Who can say they’ve been to a homicide scene or chased a bad guy?”

The work made Dominguez, 22, see the humanity in both the police and the accused — perspective he hopes will help him when he enters law school this fall.

Those unique experiences set students apart and can increase their chances of finding employment after graduation. Almost 65 percent of interns are offered a job at the end of an internship, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers’ 2014 Internship & Co-op Survey Report.

Other interns, like Morgan Mendis, 23, nab international internships. Florida International University’s Global Learning Office connected him to an internship with a nonprofit in Guatemala, where he worked to create a medical database for a rural health clinic. Now he’s about to start a job at a health care startup in Washington.

Most universities encourage students to add an internship to their resume.

Because of increased scrutiny and tightened federal labor guidelines, many internships today are paid; those that don’t pay a salary should be designed for the training and education.