Getting a Job - On Internships and Finding Out What You're Good At

This is the second of a series of posts I'm going to be doing here on autism and employment.

Internships* aren't the only way to get a job of course, but they're a way I'm personally familiar with so I am going to write about them a bit. Internships are a great opportunity for all students looking to gain experience in the workplace, but for students on the autistic spectrum, they can be utterly invaluable.

For one thing, the "interview" portion, if there is one at all, tends to be shorter and less grueling than an interview for a regular position.

For another thing, internships can give us a chance to familiarize ourselves with our competencies. Frequently, autistic persons absorb a lot of negative messages about our abilities and potential due to how we're so often told that "in order to do X, you need to be good at Y" (where "X" might be something like "engineering work", and "Y" might be something like "making good eye contact when people talk to you" or "multitasking").

The fact of the matter is that a lot of abilities aren't as connected as many people think, and it's important not to sell yourself short and presume something is impossible for you because you aren't very skilled at what "conventional wisdom" says you should be (but which may not actually have anything to do with the core competencies necessary to do the job you want).

Having an internship can give you the opportunity to experiment with different working styles and productivity tools and workarounds, so that you can get a more accurate look at what you can actually do .

Furthermore, in an internship situation, you are not expected to have prior experience in a similar job. A lot of people just starting their job search (and this most definitely applies to everyone, not just autistic people!) will get the sense that all the jobs in their field seem to require experience -- which puts those seekers in a bit of a catch-22.

Since an internship lets you gain experience without the stipulation of requiring prior experience, finding one can enable a person to break out of that "need experience to get hired, but don't have any because nobody will hire me" cycle. Again, while this is good for everyone, it is potentially even more helpful to people in demographics that don't have a high employment rate.

When you know what you can do as a result of having gained actual concrete experience doing that thing, you will have something a lot more tangible to refer to and point at when future potential employers want to know what you might bring to the company.

As for how a person gets the kind of internships I got, there are three main ways I know of:

1.) Filling out applications and/or talking to company representatives at job fairs (many colleges have job fairs on site)

2.) Responding to a flyer posted on a campus or other bulletin board from a company seeking interns

3.) Inquiring with (or being approached by) family members, family friends, or acquaintances regarding possible internships at the companies they work for.

I had two internships in college, one at NASA, and one at the aerospace company I got hired at after graduation and still work for.

My NASA internship happened because my dad nagged me to attend a job fair at a community college I didn't even attend at the time (but which I enrolled in upon applying for the internship).

I hadn't assumed it possible for me to get a job somewhere like NASA (as I figured they'd want someone with a lot more experience, or at least a lot more classes on their transcript than I had at that point), but it turned out that the school district had an educational partnership with NASA. This basically meant that I'd be on the payroll of the school district while simultaneously earning work study credits and getting to be on-site at NASA Ames Research Center learning, attending seminars, and assisting NASA employees with projects.

Still, though, I only barely managed to fill out the application and turn it in on time to be considered for a position. I think I still have a copy of that application somewhere -- I hadn't known how to answer some of the questions, so in typical Anne fashion, I just wrote...rather a lot, and I did it in very tiny writing so as to fit it all on one page.

In any case, they did hire me, and as far as I can tell they did so because of my interests and enthusiasm. Having been fascinated by space and space travel from a young age, the very idea of working at NASA had me completely starry-eyed, and I think maybe they picked up on that.

In retrospect I find it very interesting and somewhat amusing that the same kind of enthusiasm for a subject that got me in trouble in elementary school (such as in sixth grade when I was banned from doing any projects pertaining to Star Wars) ended up actually helping me get a job in college.

So, to autistic students seeking internships -- if you can find a local opportunity along the lines of one of your special interests, you may want to seriously think about applying. Being really intensely focused on something and liking it a lot can be a good thing.

The internship that led to my present job happened because a family member of mine happened to work at a company that was looking for summer engineering interns. This family member informed me of the opportunity and told the company I was interested, and upon review of my transcript, the company hired me for that summer.

That experience was quite different from my experience at NASA, in several respects. Because this was a private company and not a public research or educational entity, there was a bit more of an emphasis on "getting things done", and the pace was somewhat faster. It also paid almost twice as much as the district had paid me during my NASA internship, the hours were longer and more regular, I sat in my own cubicle rather than in an office with my boss, and there were more meetings.

During this second internship, I provided support to design engineers: lots of schematic capture, part placement and area studies (using board layout software), etc. This enabled me to get experience using the types of tools I'd likely be using as an electrical engineer later on, and also exposed me to the various types of circuits used in "real-life" devices. I remember being amazed by how large and complex the circuits were as compared to the little stripped-down models common in the example problems we had to solve in school.

Both my internships enabled me to get a much better sense of my abilities than just going to school would have. They also directly contributed to my getting a job after graduation -- as noted earlier, the second company I interned for hired me when I finished school (and, I might add, without putting me through an interview). I've been employed ever since.

Of course it hasn't all been perfect and easy -- in fact, it's been tremendously difficult, and I've been overwhelmed and sensory-overloaded a lot over the past seven years. I have a lot of trouble keeping up in realtime with everything that goes on, I still get tripped up easily by questions like "How are you?", and by the end of most days I feel like I'm escaping from the zoo! But nonetheless, I've learned a lot, and I've carved out a bit of a niche in electromagnetics, and I now have a reasonable amount of concrete experience as an engineer -- things that I know will continue to be useful into the indefinite future.

The bottom line is that it's never too early to start thinking outside the classroom and about the world beyond, and what you might want to be doing in it, based on your interests, whatever they might happen to be.

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*When I say "internship" I don't even necessarily mean a formal internship, or one that you have to be in college to get. I'm writing mostly about the kind of internship I have personal experience with, but pre-graduation experience is really the key, regardless of the form it takes.

It could be that you end up doing something more like an apprenticeship, where you start learning and practicing a skill and developing job-related competencies as early as high school.

It could be that you get a job through your school, or through some services you might be receiving (though vocational rehabilitation has a bit of a ways to go). Etc.

To me, all the above count in ways (and might have similar effects to) the kind of internship I'm most familiar with.