The ManicaPost
Rumbidzai Muchena
THE journey to any university in Zimbabwe is long and difficult. As if that is not enough the stages to graduation are even longer and more arduous. This is my story about the
woes of internship as a university student. Our education system is greatly immersed in giving us knowledge but overlooks the fact that students need to put into practice what they have learnt.
“The great aim of education is not knowledge but action,” insinuated Herbert Spencer. Action in my own point of view is to utilise the knowledge learned through education in order to curb challenges met and experienced in life and also opportunity to practise the theoretical work. In the course of my own university experience at Lupane State University I have acquired a great deal of knowledge in Applied Language but there was absence of action.
Most of university students are acquainted with theoretical work but lack practice. A great number of university students’ graduate without putting into practice what they are taught at university.
This is caused by the hardships us students encounter in securing internship opportunities in private companies and relevant institutions. Acquiring attachment places is a nightmare. No word can describe it better. It is quite rare to do internship in the area of one’s degree course. For this to happen, you need to be extremely lucky. We end up at and in places where our degree programmes are at variance with the business of the companies or institutions of internship.
Seeking for internship is like searching for a needle in a hay stack, and as I have already asserted, only the ‘lucky ones’ are able to find and put into practice what they are studying at university and of course also only those with ‘connections’. We now live in a world where to get anywhere in life you need to be connected to someone who is ‘someone’. As a result if you are not ‘lucky’ enough and without connections, you get internship at a place which is miles opposite to your degree. Many are forced to defer and try again the next academic year.
Thus, the wise words of Herbert Spencer remain a lone cry in the valley. Internship is the action Herbert Spencer referred to. I believe that the high unemployment rate of graduands is caused by the failure to get appropriate internship places.
How graduands hope to secure jobs after university when now they fail to get attachment places which suit their degree courses, is a serious cause for disillusioning anxiety.
The late global icon, Nelson Mandela warned that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb up yonder. Just like the education system in universities, internship aptly symbolises ‘a great hill’ and when a student overcomes it, they discover that there are more hills for them to climb on the horizon. And is failure to attain employment or even use their degrees to get any jobs not steep hills indeed to overcome?
Then I cannot but wonder, are universities only meant to educate us and not offer opportunities to meaningfully use that education? Are university colleges not supposed to assist and guide us into our various fields of “action”?
Someone or something must surely help to reduce or eradicate altogether this nightmare of internship. And whoever that is, the universities themselves and our Government through its Ministries of Education cannot be ruled out of this equation.
Food for thought! I am the lucky one. I got an opportunity to do my internship in Mutare, more than 500 miles away from Lupane State University in Matebeleland North.
The place of internship, EducationPanorama, aptly complements my area of study and I am learning and contributing a lot to the business and life of the Education Consultancy Office. In my Part 2 of Nightmares of Internship, read about how this is happening.
