I am a sophomore Ecology major looking for summer internships. I plan on entering a PhD program in ecology after undergrad with the hopes of doing some sort of research as a career.
I was offered a paid internship with my university’s Office of Sustainability. The pay is competitive, the hours are flexible, and it sounds like there is a lot of room for independent thinking and personal projects. I would be trying to analyze the university’s energy usage and other metrics of sustainability.
It sounds interesting and the logistics of the job are great.
But I am unsure if it is relevant to graduate schools. Will they care about an internship such as this? I also applied to a handful of REUs and other explicitly ecology-based research internships. But those are competitive and I need to reply to this offer within about a week.
So is this a worthwhile opportunity for an ecology major with grad school goals? Or should I wait for the unsure hope of an REU offer?
Would you be gaining useful skills in this internship that can transfer over to help you with your academics/research? Can you make your independent projects somehow relate to ecology and perhaps start the beginnings of an eventual conference presentation or something?
I’m not in the ecology field, but it sounds like a good opportunity to me, especially since it’s paid and it can let you do some personal projects. Sustainability is an important part of writing grants geared toward specific projects (which you very well might have to write one day in graduate school or academia), so I think getting experience with it would be useful.
Also, it’s only your sophomore year, so you have time to get more ecology-related experiences. It’s important to also dabble in other fields to get an idea of what you like to do, so this is a great opportunity for you!
There is still time to get the research experience you need to be competitive for graduate school applications. In fact, if you start working ins an on-campus research lab, the summer internship could give you the opportunity to continue with your research after hours. Getting a continuous research experience on campus can be very helpful for good Letters of Recommendation and publications. You can apply for REUs again next year.
Number one, it sounds like the paid internship is actually research-based - you’ll be analyzing something quite specific. It may be applied research, but it still counts.
Number two…not everything you do in college should be geared towards graduate school, because you never know where life will take you. You might decide to take time off between college and grad school, and the internship can help you get your job. Or after your PhD you might decide to leave academia, and the internship can help with that too. I took what I thought was a completely unrelated internship in graduate school, just to explore a bit, and it ended up indirectly leading to my first post-graduation job.