Why you should do PSC internships

I strongly recommend doing the PSC internships for any of our juniors, any at all. I think that you should do PSC internships if you fulfill 1 or more of the following criteria:
1. You are a student who lives in your own world and you dont know what our civil servants are doing for our country
2. You want to be part of the civil servants who work for our country
3. You want to take up a PSC scholarship
4. You have some kind of inclination as to what ministry you want to be in (then you can try out the work there and see if you really like it)
5. Your preferred ministry offers a TIED scholarship (important because it may either cause you to think about taking the tied scholarship as opposed to Open, or it may change your preferences in the list of ministries that you want to work in)

So why should you do PSC internships?

1. You get to do the daily work that the people there do (well a simplified version anyway because you dont have the expertise that they do). Then you can see if you like the work there.
2. You get to soak into that whole atmosphere and see if you like the whole culture of the place. Is it very dynamic? Law-by-law? Full of ideas? Contrary to your expectations/stereotypes? You can talk to colleagues and bosses and observe day-to-day interactions.
3. It's good experience, and on top of that you get paid (albeit a small sum only) for that.
4. It tells you what happens in the day of the life of a civil servant.
5. It gives you more justification and makes you more convinced about the choice of ministries that you want/dont want. Which might translate to the answers in the board interview about why you want this ministry. Indirect link, I know, but it helps. Going for the MFA internship gave me a clearer idea of what the work there was about and even though I now know some of the disadvantages of working in MFA, I still want to work there (for now).

As a sidenote, MFA IS GREAT. GO TO MFA.