The 5 Best Lessons I Learned As An Intern (So Far)

Through five-and-a-half years of undergraduate and graduate education, I have been fortunate to intern with four wonderful, yet completely unique organizations. Through these experiences, I have learned an important lesson; internships are the currency of the young professional. They impart upon us industry knowledge and bring our textbooks into the harsher shades of reality. Which is not to say that my experiences have been harsh - rather, this is to say the homework you do for class stands in stark contrast to the work you do at, well, work. Regardless of your chosen academic field, an internship builds your confidence and gives you the irreplaceable experience employers crave. Industry knowledge aside, here are the five best lessons I learned (so far) from my own internships:

1. It is a process. Those of you who have just begun an internship with a new organization, I can relate to a number of emotions you are probably feeling - uncertainty, nervousness, qualms about making the right impression; these are not only typical, I believe they are instrumental to the beginning of a healthy work relationship. If anything, they are not uncommon; Google "new job anxiety" and you get over 140 million results. No matter how experienced you are or how well you know your internship supervisor, commencing a working relationship with them invariably provides new wrinkles that you weren't prepared for. There are organizational norms to learn, personalities to understand, and nuances to each office that need to be respected.

At the internship I had prior to my current one, it took a year before I felt reasonably comfortable in my role and how I fit with the people around me. However, even then, I still felt that I had simply reached a temporary plateau, and if I had stayed longer that there would be even more to learn. We have often heard the throwaway lines about successful businesspeople; that they are "life-long learners" and "every day, they learn something new". What I believe is under-appreciated with this is how painfully un-immediate this learning is. Figuring out how your skills fit within your organization is a constant, iterative, malleable process that brings a lot of mistakes along with it. As such, don't be discouraged if you don't get it all by the end of orientation - simply knowing that you don't know is a monumental step in itself.

2. Manners matter. There is no more immediate, more powerful differentiator in the world of internships than your attitude. By bringing (appropriate levels) of energy and enthusiasm to your site, you help your own learning experience by making others feel comfortable interacting with you. It doesn't matter how much expertise or relevant personal experience you or your other co-workers have - if you don't have the right approach, all that knowledge isn't useful to anyone because it's not being communicated. At a prior internship, I strongly believe that the approach I took to my work made others think more highly of my work than I did myself. While it may not seem like much, having the right attitude is not something that supervisors always encounter and is a valued aspect of any intern, if maintained consistently. The maintenance of such attitude can be quite difficult on stressful days, which brings me to #3...

3. Don't JUST be an intern. Work is hard. Staying calm and maintaining an even keel can seem impossible in the face of angry customers, demanding supervisors, and tight deadlines. This is especially true when internships are unpaid. It is so easy to blow it off completely; "They don't pay me, so why should I put up with this?" In these times, it's imperative to maintain perspective on your internship. I do this by making sure I have something to look forward to. This could be as simple as "Once I get through today, I am plopping on the couch and playing video games for hours" or as detailed as "Overcoming challenges here is going to give me the experience I need to provide the life I want for myself and my family". Whatever it is that motivates you, make sure you constantly, religiously remind yourself of that, even when the internship is going well. Being able to contextualize your internship as a stepping-stone or as one part of your life will help you maintain the positive habits that you brought to your internship and stave off the negative ones.

4. The boardroom is not the classroom. I am tempted to write here, "EVERYTHING YOU LEARNED IN SCHOOL WAS WRONG!!", but doing so would probably give some of my former professors heart palpitations. And while that statement is an exaggeration, I will say the expectations in an internship can be very different from what you might encounter in class. For one, sending anyone an e-mail that is research-paper length is a good way to guarantee that it won't get read. Whereas homework demands comprehensiveness and detail, an internship demands conciseness. I have learned to think, "what is the piece of information that he/she needs to know" before I speak with anyone at my internship about work-related matters. Another difference between the classroom and an internship is that the internship comes with far fewer instructions. The requirements of the job that were so neatly written out in the description when you applied will quickly melt into an all-hands-on-deck, do-whatever-needs-doing approach. For work assignments, you will most likely not receive anything akin to the comfy rubric you received your first day of class, which outlines every single deadline and how you will be evaluated. Instead, you will be responsible for gathering this information yourself, either by asking for deadlines or clarification on a project, obtaining feedback, or following up relentlessly. Taking personal responsibility for obtaining the information you need to accomplish tasks is paramount to your success.

5. If you can, bring your class to work. I have been on both sides of the fence for this one. In undergrad, I refused to complete an internship during the semester because I felt that it would take away from concentrating on schoolwork (and I didn't have reliable transportation). And while night classes at grad school have allowed me to re-evaluate this stance, there is considerable value to interning while you are taking classes, especially if a class dovetails with what you are experiencing on-site. I had the fortune of taking a Human Resources course while I was completing an internship in the Human Resources department, and I found that I was excited to go to work the morning after class so I could apply the prior night's lesson. This may be more meaningful to me personally than to others, because, to be honest, I have a terrible memory and I would forget what I'd learned in class by the time my summer internship rolled around. Regardless, even with an elephant's memory, there is considerable value to immediately applying what you've learned in a real-world scenario.

---

If you are beginning an internship for the first time or have just started your search, I hope that my thoughts will help keep you in the right frame of mind. If you have interned in the past, I certainly welcome any thoughts you may have on things I have missed. I will probably edit this article in a couple months anyways, as I'm guessing that I've just reached a temporary plateau and, in time, I will have learned exponentially more.