Is LetsIntern.com still in beta?

I really liked the internship options posted on the FaceBook page of LetsIntern.com. So I went over there to their homepage, to sign up and start looking for an internship option for myself!

I had been there earlier once, but was unimpressed for some reason! But this time over the homepage didn’t repulse me! ‘So far, So good’, I thought!

‘Time to Sign up now! Let’s look for the button or text which would let me sign up and let me start looking for internships!’ but Alas! It was not so easily locatable. I felt it was hidden away under a few clicks. I might have been a one-off case of this problem, but hey! I am an ‘honest regular’ user, with ‘honest regular’ problems!

Well! I did find out the sign-up page, and signed up!

Start was good, just some basic info! But it kept asking me for a middle name (even when it was not marked with the *required)! What to do if I don’t have any! Nowhere in India middle name is compulsory, wonder why it would budge even when it was not *required!

Then came the section to fill up school, college, etc!

• School name had to be manually filled up, OK I guess.
• College name was to be selected from a dropdown! What to do when the college is not listed in the dropdown? There’s no info there! Moreover, there no ‘not in the list’ or something item in the dropdown! So the best option is to keep college name as ‘—Select—‘. I wouldn’t say “That’s so lame!” but I surely do mean to say “Really!??”

Work Profile! Nothing special there – except an amazingly different calendar to set duration from-to of work experience! Amazing!

• P.S. in case some beta developer of LetsIntern.com is reading this right now, the calendar at Work Profile is better than the ones used earlier and/or later! It’s much clearer & simpler!

• I then got to filling my ‘Skills‘. But after selecting 2 of those, I realized that the 4th one was same as the 3rd one, and this went on for many a few times.
  • Thinking the repetition would end now! now! now! I kept on selecting multiple options. But after a few-too-many, when they didn’t seem to come to an end; I stopped and analyzed the situation at hand, letting go of the selection I had already made!
  • I scrolled & scrolled & scrolled in search of getting face-to-face with the situation that I was facing! And face it, I did. There were still multiple entries stating the same skill!
  • After scrolling a long list of skills, I realized I still hadn’t even crossed ‘A’ list of skills. And now each skill was repeated like 4 or 5 times each!
  • For all I knew, I had to get away from the maddening list! And away I did get! I just cancelled all my skills!
  • There were skills like ‘? Sales Orientation’ and an ‘aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa’, guess the developers forgot that they have to keep the development and production DBs separate from each other!

After such shocks, I didn’t have the power to go any further, but yet I did!

• Then came the Internship Requirements (Internship Info, if I might say). Thankfully the selections to be made here were quite clear, and weren’t troublesome or repetitive!
  • The calendar for choosing – not good. Refer to Work Profile’s Calendar, seems better 🙂
  • Location selection – again troubling, repetitive, a bit nonsensical. No NCR option available? What’s up with that??
  • Willing to volunteer for NGO? – AWEsome option! Thankful for adding it where they did!

• Uploading a resume, and pdf format not supported? I don’t feel safe uploading a .doc or .docx file to a site for that matter. Something more that the developers could look into??

All in all, I think the website appealed to me for the internships they had on offer;

But signing up, editing the profile, and some tid-bits needs to be looked into seriously and preferably very soon.

Else it might just end up driving potential users away!! Like the UI of site drove me away some months back!

…Though I might be putting my chances of getting an internship with LetsIntern.com at very high risk, but I had to share what I saw, and feel about it being an ex-Software Engineer!

Related Articles

• The Search: The Internship as Inside Track (nytimes.com)
• Formal Internship Programs – Why They Belong on the College Completion Agenda (corporatevoices.wordpress.com)
• Is One Internship Enough? (timesunion.com)
• Interests Found with Internships (stroseenglish.wordpress.com)
• 10 Internships With Great Perks (huffingtonpost.com)