Recently I finished my first internship after freshman year in a university. It was a complete disappointment. I applied to a position that sounds very serious - "Machine Learning Software Engineer" at a company that does research in Quantum Computing. First thing that surprised me was that the interview was overly easy. They asked no questions about Machine Learning and just a couple questions about Python programming. Then, they accepted me and told me I would be given a project in "Big Data", for now. I thought that it played well for me because to be honest, I didn't know that much about machine learning, but I hoped I would learn quickly throughout the internship because I'm a fast learner and already knew the basics (but which weren't enough for research in quantum computing, in my opinion).
So, the internship began and I was given a "Big data" project. Well, the whole project was to write a program to download a list of people's names from a Facebook group using Facebook's API. I had to do it in one month and I did that in a couple of hours. Very underwhelming experience. I asked for something more, but I was told to do something on my own instead. I expected I would work in a group of people (that's what they said) on an interesting project and that I would learn a lot. Instead, I received that... Also, one thing to note: every time I had to go to their office, I needed to get some sort of security clearance (which was problematic procedure for them) and so they said I'd need to visit them only a couple times a week, the rest of the time I could work remotely. Well, in reality when I would frequently call them to ask if I should come they'd say "No need for now, you can come a little later". I ended up visiting them only a couple times a month. The whole internship was 3 months.
So, as you can see my experience is very disappointing and underwhelming given the name of the position I was given. I'm going to apply for more internships obviously, should I include this internship in my resume?
The good thing is that it would look excellent on my resume and give me a much higher chance to pass through the HRs to the interview. However, if I were asked "What did you do at that internship?" I wouldn't be able to answer that question, I would feel awkward telling what I did. I feel like I did less than 5% given the title of my position. And I really don't want to lie on the interview.
Luckily, it's not the end of the world because I have some projects of my own on GitHub and I also used that free time during that internship to learn on my own, but I learned a lot less to be honest than I could have learned if my employer fulfilled the promises.