Internship during grad school

[gldfsh]

I am about a year and half away from graduation and recently went through the summer internship application cycle at several major strategy consulting firms. I made it through and got an offer at a firm that I would love to work at post-graduation. The internship would be full time for this summer, and anywhere from 50-90% of people who do the internship get full-time offers for after they graduate.

 

I've been relatively transparent with my PI about the process. I did not ask before I applied, but as soon as I got interviews, I told my PI about them and while she did not encourage me, she did not discourage me, either. We have an overall good relationship where I keep her updated about my thoughts career-wise, and she has never stopped me from participating in extracurricular activities outside of research.

 

I am fully funded and this prevents me from taking a formal leave of absence to do the internship, as I do have about a year left and half left and this fellowship will support me for the rest of my PhD. The funding itself would have been paused if I had done the internship, and I discovered that all it would have taken was my PI's approval. My STEM department has no policy about internships and it is unknown if anyone in my department has ever taken an internship that was not directly related to their thesis research. Unfortunately, the department is also very unsupportive of people who choose to pursue careers outside of academia.

 

When I received the internship offer, I asked if I could take it. There was a lot of back-and-forth between us, and she and I both tried to reach out to professors on and off campus. She ultimately came to the decision to not allow me to do the internship, and her main reason was: "The PhD is the time for 'focus'..." I am pretty disappointed by her decision but also appreciative that she at least seemed open to it for a while, because I know that other PIs are much worse. I have spoken with the firm that gave me the offer and not taking the offer will not hurt my chances of re-applying. However, I was really hoping to do the internship so that I could get a better idea of what consulting would be like before diving into full-time applications in the fall.

 

I feel frustrated by the lack of support for people pursuing opportunities outside of the post-doc to professor route. I came to graduate school with the full belief that I would want to become a professor, but have become somewhat jaded the past two years and am now positive that I do not want to go down the academic route. It has been a difficult road, but I feel like I've done what I can.

 

I am posting on this forum because I would like to know if anyone has ever gone through this before. I would like to hear what people's thoughts are on graduate school as career training, and what to do if one's heart isn't in grad school anymore.

[blue_mango]

Hi gldfsh,

 

I'm so sorry to hear you didn't get to do the internship! It sounds like it would have been a great opportunity. Kudos to you for going through the application process and landing the offer!! No small feat, that. I think it's really too bad that there isn't more support for students considering non-academic options. I get that professors are trying to produce professors so that professing can continue, but I think (i) there needs to be more academia-industry flow, i.e. more PhDs in industry from disciplines that tend not to have students go into industry, and (ii) surely it should be up to each student to decide for themselves what they want to do with their lives... I've been a grad student for some years now and I still don't get the whole "in my image" approach to advising.

 

I have not personally had your experince, but I have been wondering about looking for internships.

 

Did you ever consider just telling your advisor you were taking time off to do the internship, rather than requesting their permission? Would you have lost your position?