The Intern Insider: Malaysia’s Largest Internship Review Source.
When The Intern Insider was first launched on 1st September 2013, we wanted to enable students to be better informed when choosing internships. We wanted the wealth of collective experience from interns – which grows in size each year – to set a higher standard for internship programmes. The plan was to have students like ourselves share stories and personal testimonials to create a very big picture of how all internships stack up against each other. By doing so, we hoped that companies would have a greater incentive to improve their internship programmes.
The Intern Insider began as a peer-to-peer site, only involving what students had to say to each other about their internship experiences. We have since decided to have companies on board, by inviting them to purchase subscriptions which allow them to advertise internship openings on their own profile pages. The aim is for The Intern Insider to become the one-stop center for internships in Malaysia, where users can browse current opportunities and compare feedback from interns in the past.
For all companies – with or without a subscription – our reviews, entirely written by your interns, are a source of honest and reliable feedback about your internship programmes. We hope that they can become useful references for ideas on what your internships might need to remain on par with, or exceed, the best that is on offer from other companies.
BAD REVIEWS AREN’T SO BAD.
We will not remove critical reviews – unless they break our rules. On the other hand, we want to stress that criticism, with regards to internships, can sometimes be biased and unfair. So we have the following points to make about ‘bad’ reviews:
1. Internships do not necessarily reflect a company’s work culture. They do reflect the merits of an intern’s supervisor and/or how well thought out the internship is.
2. An intern’s experience may be confined to a particular department, or to their particular supervisor. It is not necessarily representative of the entire company. Reviews cannot always guarantee that you will have the same experience should you decide to work at the same company – but they do give you a good idea. Take this into account when you read both praise and criticism.
3. Employees cannot be expected to divert plenty of time to be constantly engaged with interns. Reviews must take account of this.
4. Interns often do not have the skills for most tasks. It is thus sensible that they cannot be trusted with ‘important’ work. It should be clear that it is up to the intern to convince employees otherwise. It should be clear that a negative internship experience can owe to a lack of initiative from the intern him/herself.
