A reader writes:
I’m going to be starting a 3-month summer internship in the management consulting field for a reasonably small (~30 employees) boutique consultancy. I see it as the first step in my career goal to become a management consultant. My goals from this internship are:
1) To obtain a bunch of great contacts who will hopefully help me as my career progresses.
2) To start to build my reputation in the industry.
3) To learn as much as possible.
4) To obtain an offer for part time work for the rest of my university degree (something I know they’ve offered others in the past).
So, if possible, could you provide me some tips and advice to achieve the above goals? The main challenge is that this internship will really be throwing me in the deep end, so it’s likely that I’ll have to ask a lot of questions.
Oh, I love this question. I hope others will chime in with advice too. Here's my advice for all interns hoping to make a good impression and achieve the types of goals you listed:
1. Understand what to expect from an internship. The main point is to give you some basic exposure to day-to-day work in your field. In the vast majority of cases, you will not be doing glamorous, substantive work; you will be there to make other people's lives easier. This means you may get stuck doing things like photocopying, filing, arranging meetings, and other things that may strike you as drudgery. In exchange, you get exposure to the field and work experience to put on your resume.
2. However, if you excel at these boring tasks and do them cheerfully, you may be given more interesting work. Trust me on this. Many interns don't grasp this concept -- after all, what does being good at photocopying have to do with your ability to, say, do independent research? Here's why there's a connection: When you come in as an intern, you haven't proven yourself. (You can have a stellar academic record, but it still doesn't count as proving yourself in the work world.) But if you do a great job on the boring work -- yes, making the best photocopies you can make; odd as it sounds, there are ways to do that well and ways to do it badly -- you'll show that you pay attention to detail, follow instructions, and care about quality. Keep up a sustained track record of that, and eventually someone is likely to let you try your hand at something more interesting. But do a bad job on the basic stuff, and no one is going to trust you with anything more advanced. So go into it feeling that nothing is beneath you.
3. Don't worry that you'll need to ask lots of questions. Internships are designed to be learning experiences. However, to whatever extent you can, save up your questions and ask them in bunches. (This way, you're interrupting less but still getting the information you need.)
4. Ask for feedback. Every so often, ask your boss how you're doing. What could you be doing differently? Make it easy for her to give you the input that will help you grow.
5. One you get settled in and start to get to know people, ask them about themselves. How did they get into the field? What do they like about it? What do they find challenging? What advice do they have for you? Most people love to talk about themselves and will be flattered that you're asking for their advice. And it will make them want to help you.
6. You don't need to pretend to be older than you are, but do observe how others in the office act and roughly mirror it. For instance, if people modulate their voices when others are on the phone, modulate yours. If people are compulsively on-time for meetings, you should be compulsively on-time too. There are lots of little things like this that will help you appear professional by simply observing and mirroring what you see. Ad while these things may sound small, they will make you stand out compared to other interns they've had.
7. Toward the end of the internship, tell them you've loved working with them (assuming that's true) and how much you've learned. Ask if there are any possibilities of continuing to work there. And if that doesn't work out, ask if you can stay in touch. (They will say yes.) Then do it -- once the internship is over, check in with an email every so often, tell them how school is going, talk about what you're hoping to do next, ask if they have any leads or advice for you.
8. Oh, and don't wear flip flops.
Good luck! Just the fact that you're thinking about these questions puts you ahead of the game.
Showing posts with label internships. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internships. Show all posts
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Thursday, April 3, 2008
3 tips for managing interns
Summer intern season is approaching. Here are three tips for surviving it.
1. Don't cut the intern too much slack just because he/she is unpaid or low paid. You might not hold them to exactly the same standards you'd hold your regular staff to, but you should at least hold them to something close to that -- because otherwise the time that you put into hiring, training, and supervising them won't be worth it. Sometimes people feel like they can't hold interns very accountable because they're not getting paid or that they can't give them direct feedback about problem areas, but in my experience it's better to have no intern at all than to have one who you can't rely on or whose work is so sloppy that it has to be redone, etc.
2. On the opposite side of that, though, do recognize the person is working with no or little pay and find out what they're hoping to get out of the experience and see what you might be able to do to accommodate them. If they're hoping to get some experience writing something and you wouldn't normally have them doing any writing, see if there's a way to allow them to write a few small things (which you'd edit, presumably). Of course, sometimes this isn't practical; it depends on what exactly they're hoping to get experience doing. More often though, interns are simply looking to get "experience" and that can mean all kinds of things.
3. Assume interns won't know some really basic stuff about how things are done and that you'll need to give more guidance than you might with a regular employee. Make sure expectations and goals are really clear, check in regularly to monitor how their work is being executed so you can make course corrections if needed and give advice, and so forth. You also might need to explain things that would go unsaid with someone a bit older -- I've had to explain to interns in the past that they need to call if they're unable to come in (not just not show up without notifying anyone), that they can't play on MySpace all day, etc. The thing to remember is that a lot of the value of an internship for students is that it's how they learn this basic stuff about the work world -- so that when they're in a "real" position, they already know how things work. Ideally, you'll be someone who enjoys teaching someone this kind of thing; if you're not, at least see it as part of the "pay" you're providing them in exchange for their work.
1. Don't cut the intern too much slack just because he/she is unpaid or low paid. You might not hold them to exactly the same standards you'd hold your regular staff to, but you should at least hold them to something close to that -- because otherwise the time that you put into hiring, training, and supervising them won't be worth it. Sometimes people feel like they can't hold interns very accountable because they're not getting paid or that they can't give them direct feedback about problem areas, but in my experience it's better to have no intern at all than to have one who you can't rely on or whose work is so sloppy that it has to be redone, etc.
2. On the opposite side of that, though, do recognize the person is working with no or little pay and find out what they're hoping to get out of the experience and see what you might be able to do to accommodate them. If they're hoping to get some experience writing something and you wouldn't normally have them doing any writing, see if there's a way to allow them to write a few small things (which you'd edit, presumably). Of course, sometimes this isn't practical; it depends on what exactly they're hoping to get experience doing. More often though, interns are simply looking to get "experience" and that can mean all kinds of things.
3. Assume interns won't know some really basic stuff about how things are done and that you'll need to give more guidance than you might with a regular employee. Make sure expectations and goals are really clear, check in regularly to monitor how their work is being executed so you can make course corrections if needed and give advice, and so forth. You also might need to explain things that would go unsaid with someone a bit older -- I've had to explain to interns in the past that they need to call if they're unable to come in (not just not show up without notifying anyone), that they can't play on MySpace all day, etc. The thing to remember is that a lot of the value of an internship for students is that it's how they learn this basic stuff about the work world -- so that when they're in a "real" position, they already know how things work. Ideally, you'll be someone who enjoys teaching someone this kind of thing; if you're not, at least see it as part of the "pay" you're providing them in exchange for their work.
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