5 reasons why you should do atleast one writing internship, irrespective of what you study!
I started Internshala as a blog and at that time the only skill I had was I could write. Three years later, with Internshala being where it is today, I feel this skill played a BIG role throughout Internshala’s journey.
Writing, seemingly boring, highly under-rated, and often ignored skill, can do wonders to you as a person and to your career, if you nurture it well. Here is how?
1. Writing brings clarity of thought
In my first job as an analyst at Capital One, we all used to make presentations to senior management on new projects and ideas. And these presentations used to be full of jazz – the fancy graphs, cute animations, exaggerated lingo. The life was a smooth sail. Then one day, the presentations were banned across the company. We were asked to submit all the new ideas/proposals/analysis as 1 to 2 pages long word documents. And suddenly all hell broke loose.
When we were forced to write complete sentences and paragraphs, all of which together should make for a compelling case – we began to see logical gaps in our arguments, ‘unconscious’ assumptions that we were making, which forced us to think clearer on the business problem we were trying to solve and bring more rigor to analysis we were performing. Earlier, all of this used to get lost in bold slide headlines.
Here is a quick exercise for you – think of whatever problem or dilemma you are facing right now. Try to write down what it is, what are the possible ways you can solve it, and what are the challenges which may come in your way of solving it, and how you can address them. Let me know if you don’t feel better equipped to solve the problem at the end of the exercise. That is the power of writing.
2. Writing improves your knowledge
When you write, especially if you write for public consumption, you need to research/ponder over various aspects of the topic well to be able to formulate a clear opinion. This automatically leads to improved knowledge on the subject. And if you write on a variety of topics, over time, you would find yourself a better informed person than you were before you started writing. A corollary of this is that if you want to start writing but don’t know where to start from – start with a topic that you think you know well.
3. Writing makes you more creative
Yes, this seemingly mundane task would lead to awesome creative sparks from time to time. When you write regularly, at some point, you would get bored of your own writing and would look for ways to innovate – the same thing can be said in hundred different ways to catch a reader’s attention. For example, I first titled this article as ‘Benefits of writing’ but I felt it was too boring a title to interest anyone and I changed it to something that I felt could be more catchy with Internshala audience – and if you are reading this article till this point, you know I have been successful :)
4. Writing is a good way to document your life
Remember the now ‘out of fashion’ and often risky (how many movie plots have involved a person’s diary falling into wrong hands!) practice of keeping a diary? Other than serving as an evidence to your life, your writings will also help you introspect how you, as a person, have evolved over the years. And this introspection would lead to further refinement of your personality and thinking.
5. Finally, writing is good for your career
Contrary to popular notion, good writing skills are must not only for select few trades such as journalism, media, marketing, management etc. Any profession you choose, would require you to present your thoughts in a written form in front of others (emails, executive summary, proposals). If you are applying for studies abroad, you would need to write a convincing SOP; if you are a scientist/academician, you would write grant proposals; if you are a software engineer, you would be working on documentation or training juniors; looking for that next big raise, write a persuasive self appraisal. Name any career of your choice – this, seemingly boring, highly under-rated, and often ignored skill of writing will play a role in defining your success, or failure.
So if I were you, looking for a helpful career advice, this would be it – my dear friend, start writing! And the only thing better than writing is writing and getting paid for it. There are many Editorial & Content Writing internships posted on Internshala – what are you waiting for? :)
