Internships might matter more than your degree

Okay so let's say you've ruled out the doctor, lawyer, engineer route. You're not in one of those fields where the degree is just the path. You're somewhere in the bigger, fuzzier middle, where what you study and what you actually end up doing for work might not even line up that closely.

This is the part of the course where we have to start being a bit more strategic, because in this middle ground, the rules of the game are different from what your guidance counsellor probably told you.

Here's the thing nobody really sat me down and explained when I was your age.

For a lot of fields, work experience matters more than the piece of paper does. Sometimes way more.

Think about it for a second. If you're a hiring manager, and you've got two candidates in front of you, one with a four year degree and zero work experience, and one with no degree but four years of stacked internships in the actual industry, who are you picking? The second one, almost every time. Because they've already been doing the job. They know what an office looks like. They know how to handle a client. They know how to take feedback. The first one has a transcript and a hopeful smile.

This is something a lot of young people don't realise until it's too late. The four years you spend grinding for a GPA might not actually be doing as much for your employability as you think they are, especially if you're going into a field where employers genuinely care more about what you can do than what you studied.

There's also a really underrated upside that gets lost in this conversation, which is that an internship can quietly turn into a full time job. It happens all the time. You go in for a summer, you do good work, you don't make yourself difficult to be around, and somewhere around the end of it, someone in that company decides they don't want to lose you. Suddenly you've got an offer in hand without ever having to compete in the brutal entry level job market that everyone else is drowning in. You've already proven yourself, they already know you, the trust is built. That's worth a lot, and it's a route into a career that a lot of people don't even realise exists.

So if you're in one of those fields where internships are common, and you can swing it, this might genuinely be the path. Not as a supplement to a degree, but possibly instead of one, or at least as a much bigger part of the equation than you've been led to believe.

And here's the bonus that nobody really talks about. Internships pay. Sometimes not very well, and sometimes not at all, but at the very least, you're not paying them. You're not getting any poorer. You're not racking up debt. Even an unpaid internship is, in a strict financial sense, a much better deal than a degree, because you're investing your time but not your money.

Compare that to four years of college, where you're paying tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn things that, in some fields, an internship would teach you for free in six months.

That doesn't mean degrees are useless. There are plenty of fields where the degree opens doors that internships alone won't. But before you commit, ask yourself honestly. In the field you're looking at, what actually gets people hired? Look at the LinkedIn profiles of people who have the job you eventually want. How did they get there? Did they all do prestigious degrees, or did most of them stack internships and work their way up?

The answer to that question, more than anything else, should shape how much weight you put on a degree in the first place.

And one more thing on this. If you're going to go the internship route, you have to be aggressive about it. You can't just apply to one internship in the summer of your second year and call it done. You have to be applying constantly, taking the unpaid ones early, building up a real portfolio of experience, and treating it the way someone else might treat their GPA. Because that stack of internships is going to be your transcript, and the longer you stay in good standing at any of those companies, the higher the chance one of them quietly turns into the offer that sets up your whole career.

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Reflect: Pick a job you might actually want one day. Look up three people who currently do that job, on LinkedIn or wherever. How did they actually get there? Did the path they took match what you've been told the path should look like?