
Younger workers find that there are advantages to being in the office, as one former Fast Company intern found when he considered his experience and those of four other summer interns.
“I’ve had the flexibility to come into Fast Company’s New York City offices three days per week during the summer,” wrote Alex Dong, “although I’m typically here all five days because of the benefits I’ve found from in-person work.”
He was not alone in his discovery. Fifty percent of Gen Z workers prefer in-person jobs, compared with only 34 percent for millennials and members of Gen X, a recent report by Joblist found. Curious to learn more about what other interns have been experiencing, he spoke with the four summer interns who worked in fields such as tech, public policy, and journalism.
Being in person has real advantages, the biggest one being meeting people through unscheduled interactions. That helped the interns to build connections.
“When you’re in a remote internship, you really only interact with people through meetings—and those meetings tend to have a purpose,” says Stephanie Su, a rising junior at the University of California, Berkeley, working as a hybrid software engineering intern at Snap Inc. “If you want to meet someone casually, you have to set up a one-on-one, whereas in-person, you see someone in the kitchen, you pass by their desk, it’s a lot easier to socialize.”
Scheduled remote conversations are not the same, said Sasha Gerber, a rising senior at Duke University working as a hybrid public policy intern at Verizon.
“The work will probably stay at the company and it won’t go much past 12 weeks. However, the relationships that you build with people, I find that those are much longer lasting,” Su said. “My favorite thing about my internships is less about the work…but more about the people that I’ve met.”
Asking for help is easier in person, Dong reported.
“If I’m working on something, I can literally just turn my monitor to the person next to me and ask their opinion on it, which feels a bit smoother than writing a whole email to just ask a quick question,” said Gerber. “It’s so much more casual to just ask a question in-person, rather than formatting a Slack message that’s grammatically correct, friendly, and approachable,” said Eleanor Chalstrom, a rising senior at Iowa State University working as a remote journalism intern at home improvement website Bob Vila.
Remote internships also have advantages, such as being more inclusive under certain circumstances, Dong’s sources told him. This can be the case in such instances as unaffordable housing, long commutes, or domestic responsibilities. But the flexibility may work for some, such as Chalstrom, who went on hikes after work.