My 2024 Internship Experience – Maddie Brink
As we recently had the career fair and many people are busy applying for internships, I thought it would be a good idea to share about my internship this past summer.
This past summer I interned with Beck’s Hybrids as a PFR intern. PFR is Practical Farm Research. PFR is just what it sounds like, a program that researches practical farming practices. This can range from tillage, to different spray techniques, to new technologies in agriculture. At the end of the year, Beck’s publishes a book with all the research data and gives it out to their customers to help make them better farmers.
Some of my duties as a PFR intern included putting up field signs, aiding in research tasks by preforming things such as root digs and nodule counts, scouting the research plots, and overall plot maintenance. The interns also got to do some of their own research projects. I researched tissue test time of day to see the difference in nutrient levels, and another project on different urea coatings and how they broke down over time in no till and conventional tilled fields.
One of the best things about the internship was that Beck’s provided housing for free to the interns who needed it. Since I am from Michigan, there was no Beck’s location near me so I interned at their main location in Atlanta, IN. I lived in a house with two other interns. The house was fully furnished with everything we needed, and only two miles from work! Us interns did a lot of things together; we had lots of campfires and cookouts together over the summer.
Overall, I’m so glad I decided to do this internship. I learned a ton about research and seed corn production, all of which I think will be beneficial for my future. However, working in research made me realize I don’t want to do that full time. I like going out and meeting with farmers better. I think this shows that you don’t always have to love every aspect of your internship, learning what you don’t want to do is just as beneficial as learning about something you do want to do.