<p>Hi all, </p>
<p>As I am nearing the end of my internship I am wondering if it is professionally better to return to the same company for my next internship, or get a breadth of experience by trying a different environment.</p>
<p>I am an IE major, currently working in Process Engineering for a major Railroad.
-A lot of the projects they work on are studying capacity issues to recommend additional infrastructure to clear up bottlenecks, and looking at existing processes/logistics and finding ways to reduce delay. </p>
<p>-Basically I have done a lot of data analysis, got a lot of boots on the ground experience with doing a large scale time study, and I also put a lot of work into building them a VBA Macro that saves them about 5-6 hours of work by importing and analyzing all of their simulation data, with graphs, in just a few clicks.</p>
<p>-Just wondering if it is best to do multiple internships with the same company, or have a wider degree of experience and venture into manufacturing , healthcare, or consulting (we have decently large recruitment from all three at my school)</p>
<p>Thanks for any insight.</p>
<p>For any other engineering I’d go for internship depth, for IE I’d say breadth - esp. health care or manufacturing.</p>
<p>Do you think you want to work there full time? If so, then just intern there again. If not, absolutely don’t intern there again unless it’s all you can get (it’s kinda late to be still looking for an internship). If you’re not sure, I would recommend you find another but try to keep some relation with the company. Say that you’re interested but want to see another company because you want to make sure that going to to their company would be the right choice, or some such nonsense.</p>
<p>I’m actually doing a spring “internship”. Basically a co-op without the commitment, and the next internship my schedule will permit is summer '14. Just doing a bit of forward thinking since I’m pretty sure they are going to ask me to recommit in the next month or so.</p>
<p>It’s a great company, fortune 300, and you will never have to worry about the railroad going out of business. But, yeah, I haven’t really seen anything else, so I am not sure If I would want to work here full time.</p>
<p>Thanks for the advice. I will definitely keep good relations with them.</p>
<p>I was in a similar position and I decided to intern at 3 different ccompanies. I don’t know if I’m going to work at any of them but by working at multiple companies I am getting a better idea of what I want to do. I say look elsewhere.</p>