Internship Experience At Home
From 1st September 2020 to 31st December 2020, I did my internship at FWD Technology and Innovation Malaysia. It was a new experience for me as doing an internship from home without being physically in there at the office is a totally different experience. Although I had done internships before, I had never experienced something like working from home. It was a challenge in the first few weeks but I managed to slowly adapt to it.
The first difference is communication. Having seniors teach virtually means we have to learn through the screen. It makes communication much harder compared to learning physically with the senior right beside you. Virtual communication might seem easy but there are many barriers. We used Microsoft Teams to communicate and our seniors have to share the screen with us to teach us. Learning through the screen is a new skill that we all need to learn.
One disadvantage of having an internship at home is the challenging work environment. There are a lot of distractions when working from home, such as our other family members that converse behind the scene, the television, and the worse distraction of all time is the sight of your comfy bed. We tend to be more distracted when working from home compared to working at the office. At home, there is no one to keep an eye on us, there’s no strict senior that made us more cautious in what we are doing, there is no one to ensure that we are working productively. We can get easily distracted and subconsciously get side-tracked in doing other things. This is one of the disadvantages of working from home compared to being physically in the office.
This has lead to an independent learning experience. Due to not being physically in the office, we have to learn to be independent in our work. We cannot easily ask our seniors as they might be too busy to reply to our messages and we have to keep ourselves from getting distracted. We have to attempt to solve our problems and difficulties on our own most of the time. We basically have to independently try to solve our own issues and problems.
One of the advantages of doing an internship from home is the amount of time that you saved. There’s no time spent on traveling and we don’t have to waste time in getting ready for work. We do not need to wear beautiful clothes or make-up. We can just sit there and work from out comfy bed. We do not need to get stuck in traffic during the peak hours and we are also able to safe money. The time that we saved can be used to increase work productivity. As for me, it basically save me hours of traveling time and money as well.
Another disadvantage of working from home is having a bad internet connection. With a bad internet connection, being on call becomes a hassle as the line keep breaking, the call breaks too. It is very annoying when the breaking lines made the conversation became intangible and I cannot understand what my senior is trying to say.
In conclusion, working from home is a new working experience that many people need to adapt to during this pandemic. Many corporate offices have asked their staff to work from home to prevent the spread of the virus by reducing physical contact between staff. Society will need to start adapting to this new norm in the future time to come.