Say you’re majoring in finance and you got two job offers:
One is an internship for half-a-year at a finance/investing firm.
Second is an “actual” part-time finance assistant/accounting job.
If in the future, if you were striving to go to somewhere big (Goldman sachs, Big 4, you name it)…what would look better? An internship? Or an actual job?
Would the firm/business make a bigger difference? (Respectable firm vs. mom and pop shop experience)?
The big names go fishing in the best ponds. The most recent Goldman hire I know (last month) had 1 summer internship (at another big banking firm) to their credit- plus an honors degree (in chemistry- had never taken a single business / accounting / finance class) from a very fancy college.
I wonder how much you know about life at Goldman / Big 4 / etc. Imo it will benefit you more to do the internship at the sort of firm where you think you want to work. Go see what it is actually like to work there, and decide if it suits you.
It entirely depends on the internship and the job and what you’ll be doing. Sometimes the only real distinction between a part-time internship and a part-time job is the name they call you.
However, it’s often the case that internships are specifically designed to train/teach students and new entrants into the field, whereas a part-time job is just to get some work done that they need. That doesn’t mean you can’t learn a lot and use it to build experience, but it may mean that the internship has more built-in opportunities for you to learn (speaker series, formal mentors, lunch and learns, etc.) whereas the part-time job may not have that kind of structure.
Interns may also get better projects/work than part-time employees in some places - at my company we specifically design projects of some consequence for our interns, so they can complete real work and have something to show for their summer. However, the opposite could be true as well - some people may give their interns grunt work or nothing of real consequence, whereas their part-timers get real work.
At some companies, interns also have a special status that makes it easier for them to get on the calendars of important people for coffee or lunch. At my company people bend over backwards to do nice things for interns, which is over and above what we’d do for part-timers or even a new FTE hire. The ethos is that these are people who want to learn more and we want to give them a good experience and have them come back.
But the firm itself also matters. A big investment company wants to see big names on your resume - so if one of the two companies is way more well-known than the other (say, a part-time job at Bank of America’s corporate offices vs. an internship in a small unknown firm), that may play a large part in your decision. However, it’s not the SIZE so much as the prestige of the firm - there are some small boutique firms that may be very successful and well-known in your industry, so you’d have to ask around to find out.