All I really wanted to know, I learnt in Kindergarten

I am sure all of us agree that the school of life teaches us lessons everyday.  In a sense, I think we are all interns here, and the workplace keeps changing with every stage that we experience in our growth.

 

This thinking is at a macro level, and we are interning under unseen hands, unfamiliar experiences.  Let us use this metaphor at a micro level, in our day to day living where we are preparing for our careers.

 

These days, I think college students have a tremendous opportunity of getting an exposure to work culture, right from the time they decide on a line of career.  Corporates and firms are also open to having these students in their office spaces, more so as they are available free, (not all interns are paid, and even if they are, it is a pittance) and also because good workers are hard to come by, and the intern could be a prospective employee in the future, thus saving money in terms of advertisements and interviews in the future.

 

While of course it is important for the interns to take their exposure to the workplace, I think it is also equally important for the firms who hire these interns to give them a positive environment to grow and nurture them.  It is equally important to make these interns retain their basic social ideologies of being friendly, sharing and cooperative.  No doubt it is a cut-throat environment out there, but we tend to forget that while in the earlier days, we would enter workplaces when we were a lot older, and with more wisdom regarding the outside world in our pockets... These youngsters are still raw, some of them bewildered by the working of an office environment, and who could wonder why the executive down the aisle is yelling at him for no fault of his!

 

I had a young student who spoke to me of her experiences in a firm where she was interning.  She was amazed at the sheer lack of what she referred to as 'manners'.  It seems the crowd there would order food for only themselves, while the interns would be sitting right next to their tables.  The biscuits etc. would be passed around and the interns would not even be offered!

 

Well, while I am not saying all firms are like that, the interns who are exposed to the kind of the social manners in the work environment described above, go away questioning all that they learnt while they were growing up!

 

I suggested to this particular young intern that she buys biscuits the next day and passes it around.  She was a little hesitant but agreed to try it out, even saying she will buy cream biscuits so that they cant refuse.

 

It worked... The third day, when they were having snacks, they offered it to her too...

The lesson learnt by the young intern was outside of the work environment, a life skill from a person who believes that there is goodness in every human being.  I hope some of the people in the firm also learnt how important it is to make others feel at home.  And more importantly, I hope this young intern also learnt that sometimes we need to gently prod others to behave themselves, and not forget, as Robert Fulghum says, All I really wanted to know, I learnt in kindergarten.