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I will soon start a 2 months internship, in a financial software company. However, I may need to take a day off and take some on site interviews to an other company, 2 weeks after starting. I am unaware of the proper etiquette regarding day off and interns, is it something that is widely frown upon ? Does it -at all- play a part in getting a return offer ?
Clarifications: The internship is in Japan, in a non Japanese company.
Thanks.
It's def. a risk to ask for a day off in a 2 month internship if you want a return offer from that same company. With that short of time the probably want to see what you are made of, asking for a day off when you haven't even been there for two months and were pulled on as an intern for that time will def. be frowned upon.
That being said, a job is far better than an internship, if you are confident about this interview coming up then it may well be worth doing that risk. I suggest looking into trying to find out how and if other interns have taken days off and how they went about it. It's impossible to know your specific circumstances as someone that isn't you, but personally I wouldn't pass up a solid paid gig that I'm confident about to simply be viewed better as an 'intern' in a place that didn't give me the same opportunity to begin with.
You may just have to pull out your 'confident pants' and ask for that day/days off, go about it politically - there are companies that don't give contractors days off but they do give them sick days and miraculously, more people seem to get sick.
It's also an option to see if the companies will work with you, explain you have an internship currently running and would love to interview with them and see what times they are available that work for you better - if you have the interview then they are already slightly invested in the process.
Good luck
You ask for a day off, and you make it clear that you'll make up for that day off. If you can take half a day off rather than a full day off, you'll be even less disruptive.
As an intern, it's unlikely that what what you are working on is on a project's critical path - if you are on a critical path, then your boss should have known better than let the outcome of a project depend on an intern's contributions. Not very ego enhancing to you, but that's how I would have handled you as my intern - I don't want you to be to my team as a Chaos Monkey would be to Cloud operations. Nothing personal, but I have deadlines to meet, a team's reputation to preserve and managerial headaches I want to avoid.
Some interns have complained on this site that they were not 100% busy and in fact, that they were only 40% busy. If you fall into this category of interns, you'll make up for any time you take off very easily.
Your internship could end at your manager's whim. Further, you're not guaranteed that your manager will call you back once your internship ends. This means that you have to be proactive about your internship ending and being proactive means that you have to go on interviews.
In my time, I used to ask for some time off and I would have been very up front if the management asked me what I was up to - I would have told them that since they can't guarantee that they'll call me back, I have to have a plan B in place. They never asked because they had a pretty good idea why I was asking for the time off, and that my asking for time off was my being simply prudent about how I managed my future.
One of the purposes of some internships is to make the intern want to work for them. This is a way to see how you work with their culture, so they will want to treat you exactly the way they treat their employees.
The first place to see about getting a day off is to look at the HR documents they provide you before or on the first day of work. Look to see if it discusses procedures for taking vacation, sick, or PTO (Paid time off). It is a good sign if it discusses your balances for these items, or how they are earned. The documents may also describe flexible schedules: in other words they allow you to work any 40 hours in week as long a your manager approves. Some even allow you to work 4x10 or 80 hours over 9 days.
The more flexibility they describe, the more easily you can schedule those hours you need to miss to attend an interview.
When you do need to ask for time away for the office, do so as soon as you can so that they can adjust. You may even want to discuss it before your first day. This is especially true if the time off is early in the internship, because they may still be training you.
