
Ask HN: Should I quit my internship? - whydididothis
I&#x27;m an undergrad at &lt;pretentious university&gt; starting my third week of a CS internship at &lt;large famous tech company&gt; doing front-end design and development. I took it mostly for the money - the project is vaguely interesting, but nothing particularly new or exciting - although finances aren&#x27;t a pressing issue.<p>So far I absolutely hate it. My supervisor and team feel lethargic, and just being in the building feels draining. It&#x27;s very difficult to get work done. I dread sleeping because I have to go to work when I wake up, and haven&#x27;t felt this dead since high school.<p>Furthermore, I have a long hit list of extremely exciting personal projects that I&#x27;m dying to tackle, although none are likely to be profitable. Personal projects are a huge part of my life (and resume), and I love working on them. Even worse, I have the opportunity to develop one of them as a research project with &lt;extremely famous professor&gt; &quot;if I&#x27;m free&quot;.<p>How bad of a move is it to quit an internship? I&#x27;ve heard it&#x27;s bad, but I&#x27;ve no sense of scale. Is there protocol for doing so? I now recognize this as a bad decision from the start, and don&#x27;t want to be a whiny brat, but still want to make the best decisions from wherever I am.
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gradschool
To confirm what other comments have expressed, most jobs aren't as much fun as
working on your own projects. Maybe you knew that but you feel that this job
goes over and above standard levels of banality. Fair enough.

The main thing I'd add is that I hope the alternative you're considering is a
paid research assistantship funded by a grant, which should be no problem for
such a famous professor to organize. It's easy as a student to be convinced
that your professor's research is the next big thing, but funding is a
reasonable proxy for whether anyone else thinks so. Otherwise, it's quite
possible to do a lot of great innovative and interesting research that is met
with indifference by future employers and academics because you've misjudged
the way things are going due to spending too much time on your own.

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cpeterso
The point of an internship is to gain "real world" experience and begin
networking. If you won't learn anything from your intern project or team
members, then the internship is just a way to add <large famous tech company>
to your resume.

That could be a good thing, but it sounds like you would get more personal
satisfaction and public recognition from working on your research project with
<extremely famous professor>. You can just omit the internship from your
resume. No one will know or care.

Just make sure you have something lined up before you quit. :)

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brudgers
Curious as to how long the internship will last. As far as my random advice
goes, the reason for an internship is to learn and it sounds like there are
valuable lessons that might be acquired by sticking it out. One of them is
figuring out where the interesting things in a big organization are happening.
Another is just simply how big organizations really work because that requires
questioning one's assumptions about how things really get done at scale.

There's no right answer, but absent the work environment causing a serious
mental health issue the experience will be very informative. At the end of the
internship, doing a research project is still possible. Academia ain't going
anywhere in the next few weeks.

Good luck.

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ColinWright
Can you do the work? Then do the work. But outside of that ...

Try to analyse what it is about the job that you hate. You say the team feels
lethargic? Is it the work that's made it so, or has it become a cultural thing
that's self-perpetuating?

Having looked at that, the puzzle to solve, the challenge to set yourself is
this: Can you change your job?

A colleague of mine spent the first three months in his real job coming to
understand the work, the next three months coming to understand the internal
dynamics, and the next six months slowly changing his job description and
specification to become something challenging, rewarding, and enjoyable.

Can you do that? There's your challenge.

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gjvc
Sounds like excellent preparation for the real world -- life will throw you
MUCH bigger challenges than this both in and out of the workplace. You won't
get to work on what you want. Projects get cancelled, moved to other groups,
and generally managed poorly in many if not most places.

The good news amongst this misery is you can act different from the crowd, and
improve matters. Start by being grateful for your situation, opportunity, and
prospects, and don't be a dick about it.

I quit an internship once. The company went bust a decade later, and doesn't
appear on my resume. No big deal.

