Every morning, a college student is expected to perform a magic trick: be in two places at once.
One is counting your classes, the other is counting on you. You can reply to both, but unless you know how to teleport, you cannot be present in both places.
I recently started working, and that was when I realised how little time we actually get as students.
Between classes, assignments and everything else that comes with college, there is already barely enough of it. On top of that, we are expected to worry about maintaining attendance while also gaining the experience that might eventually help us get a job.
At one point, I started balancing an internship with a new kind of mathematics I learned. If two lectures are missed on Monday and three more on Wednesday, how many classes must be attended before the percentage looks safe again? It became a calculation I was doing more often than I expected-and one that many students trying to work alongside college probably know too well.
The reason for all this maths is simple: a degree is important, but apparently not enough to get us a job.
We also need portfolios, skills and practical experience. Then an opportunity arrives-usually in the middle of a semester, with office hours that overlap almost perfectly with college timings.
Suddenly, being ambitious begins to look suspiciously similar to being absent.
Choose college and the CV remains empty. Choose the internship and attendance begins to fall. Either way, a student loses.
The balancing act nobody prepares us for
College and internships teach us different things, but the trouble begins when both demand the same hours. On internship days, lectures continue, assignments are announced and attendance quietly falls. On college days, office deadlines do not disappear either.
That was one of the first things I realised after starting work: being at an internship does not make everything happening in college pause. Whatever you miss is simply waiting for you when you return.
And what we miss is not limited to lectures. FOMO sets in as events are planned and conversations between friends turn into inside jokes which you’re no longer a part of. Announcements reach us through screenshots. We remain part of the class, but also slightly outside it.
It is a strange feeling to know what is happening in college mostly through messages on your phone. You are technically still part of everything, just experiencing some of it second-hand.
After the internship ends, the college day begins again-only without the classroom. Notes must be borrowed, missed topics covered and assignments completed. One group chat contains blurry photographs of the board, another contains work waiting for the morning.
Attendance vs internship: The student balancing act
I realised that catching up becomes a responsibility of its own. Finishing work does not necessarily mean the day is over; sometimes it just means it is time to start covering everything that happened while you were gone.
What do students want? Apparently, everything. Attendance, practical experience, a respectable CV, an active college life and enough sleep to remember any of it.
We are expected to attend every lecture, work enough to appear employable and fit both into the same 24 hours. When the timings clash, the answer is “manage better”-because calendars apparently stretch when students try hard enough.
“Just manage both” sounds simple from the outside. From the inside, it feels like catching up with one responsibility while attending to the other. Unfortunately, being chronically online has not unlocked the ability to exist in two places.
On a CV, the internship becomes one neat bullet point. It does not mention the long commutes, low-battery evenings or calculations on the attendance portal. Nor does it mention the smaller things-the lecture you planned to attend but could not, the notes you asked someone to send later, or the moment you checked your attendance percentage and immediately started calculating how many classes it would take to recover.
Plot twist: We were learning all along
The ironic part is that while the portal labels us absent, we may be doing exactly what our course is preparing us to do.
That contradiction became much more obvious to me once I started working. Things that can feel theoretical inside a classroom suddenly make sense when you have to use them for an actual task.
A journalism student may be marked absent from reporting class while literally reporting a story. A design student may miss client communication while replying, “Sure, I’ll make the changes,” for the fifth time.
College deadlines give us enough time to add a task to our calendar and still ignore it until the night before. At work, “urgent” can appear at 4:57 pm. In class, feedback comes as marks; at an internship, “just a few changes” can mean starting again.
These experiences give classroom lessons real-world context. A definition we once memorised becomes something needed to complete an actual task. And sometimes, it is only after seeing something play out at work that you understand why you were taught it in the first place.
Attendance portals, however, are brutally simple: present or absent. They see an empty desk, not the article being written, campaign being developed or first professional mistake being corrected.
An internship letter is not a hall pass to vanish from college. We know what missing lectures costs because we are the ones requesting notes and decoding blurry notebook pictures. I know that cost too.
Missing a class does not mean forgetting about it. It usually means finding a way to make up for it later, while continuing with everything else.
The point is not that attendance does not matter. Some classes require physical participation, and an internship cannot automatically become an excuse to skip college. But relevant work experience should not always be treated as the opposite of learning either.
That is also why the real conflict is faced by students who care about both college and their careers. We want to understand what we study and discover how it works outside the classroom. We want the college experience, but we also know that eventually we will have to step outside the campus and prove that we can actually use what we learned.
Instead, we often feel guilty about whichever place we are not in.
At work, there is the feeling that you should be in class. In class, there can be the thought of the work still waiting for you. It is difficult to feel fully present anywhere when you are constantly calculating where you are supposed to be next.
So we continue attempting the same magic trick, hoping that building a career does not come at the cost of completing a degree.
We may never learn how to teleport. But preparing for our future should not require us to choose between being present for our education and gaining the experience that education is supposed to prepare us for.
(The author is an intern with The Indian Express)
Choose college and the CV remains empty. Choose the internship and attendance begins to fall. Either way, a student loses. (AI generated image) 
Attendance vs internship: The student balancing act
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