Internships should build careers, not cost lives

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THE tragic death last month of a final-year environmental science student from Universiti Putra Malaysia, who drowned while conducting maintenance work in a water reservoir as part of his industrial training, raised a difficult question: “Are internships still serving their purpose, or have some become a source of inexpensive labour with inadequate protection?”

A few months earlier, a mechanical engineering student at Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR) had lost his life in an explosion involving an air-conditioning compressor only days before completing his internship.