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Possibilities for IT internship - ColdCore - 2013-10-14
I am currently in my 2nd year of IT studies and am required to participate in an internship in my next and last year. My university provides several connections to international partners but my real dream is to get an internship in Japan.
I have very limited work experience and my Japanese level is basic and hasn't been 'field-tested' yet. I've been studying for 1.5yrs now and can read through news articles and manga while understanding ~50% but full length novels are still too hard. Despite this I am very motivated and of course am continuing my self-study.
I was wondering what the possibilities were for getting an internship in IT in Japan. I understand that a native company might not be suitable due to my limited writing abilities but I've been considering applying with a multinational that has an office in Japan.
Currently I've found several offers where only basic Japanese skills are required and where I could possibly apply for. I wouldn't want to come off as a lazy foreigner that wants the easy way out but the internship is next year and I think this would be a great opportunity to get my feet wet and see how I like working in Japan.
Does anyone have any tips? Recommendations? Personal stories or anything else to share? I would greatly appreciate it!
Thanks in regard!
Possibilities for IT internship - hyvel - 2013-10-24
Sorry for not answering any faster. I feel bad about you not getting any replies yet even though the question is well formulated and very relevant. So let me share some of my experiences. Please bear in mind though that they are based only on a rather small sample size (10-20 interns), so it might not accurately reflect reality.
Background: I did an internship at a large German automotive supplier in Japan from March to August in Yokohama doing mainly programming work.
Observations:
1) The notion of an internship is mostly unknown to Japanese companies. They have something called 見学 (kengaku), but that is more like 'visiting' a company for some short amount of time and getting shown around rather than actually doing any work. Therefore, finding an internship might prove quite hard, especially at Japanese companies. Your odds should be somewhat better at multinational companies.
2) Related to 1: Even if a company decides to hire interns, they might not really know what to do with them (as maybe the person responsible for supervising the intern has never had any intern). I've met quite some interns struggling with this 'problem' of not really having any meaningful tasks assigned to them. A lot of them have wasted a big portion of their time browsing facebook and looking busy...
However, this is also up to you. You can still make something out of such situations, you just have to be proactive. For example, I also faced times when I didn't really have anything to do. However, I just took the time and liberty to learn how to program. Or during meetings that I was encouraged to attend even though I really didn't really have too much to contribute myself, I just focused on trying to understand everything they said and looked up all the unknown words on my dictionary and so on...
3) Language and culture barriers obviously exist, so overcoming 2) might not be so easy. It's rewarding though. Regarding your Japanese skills: While knowing Japanese definitely helps, as most internships are offered by multinational companies, they will be mostly 'nice-to-have' and not really mandatory. From your description it seems like you'd be off to a promising start! Because if you already know some Japanese, you can pick up a lot more just by being thrown into a Japanese work environment. Someone starting from scratch will miss this chance though.
So based from my limited experiences, doing an internship in Japan might not be the best option if you want to get better at your chosen craft and want to hone your skills there ('be pushed/challenged'). So if that is your main motivation, I'd be a bit hesitant to recommend doing an internship in Japan unless you really find a promising position.
From a cultural & language learning perspective though I found the internship very rewarding. When I first started at work, I didn't really know how to approach my coworkers and had a hard time dealing with almost anything. However, after some time that settled down and we managed to work together. Working in a Japanese environment has definitely broadened my horizon, even though that might sound terribly cliché.
I hope this helps you somewhat. Forgive me for the somewhat mixed opinion. I don't want to scare anyone away and I think that going to Japan for an internship was one of my best decision and experiences so far in my life. However, there are also these drawbacks.
Feel free to ask any other specific questions!
Further hints:
Finding an internship:
http://www.kopra.org lists internships in Japan mainly from big foreign companies. So this might be of help during the search. Otherwise also have a look at 'iaeste'.
More testimonials:
The Swiss-Japanese Chamber of Commerce has a scholarship that sends people to Japan for one year to first learn Japanese and then do an internship. All the people doing that have to write a report and a lot of them are published online. If you want to read in-depth about the experiences others have made, I can recommend having a look at those. It's not just IT though!
http://www.sjcc.ch/scholarship-fund/reports-testimonials/scholarship-reports