Internship: the parent perspective

As an HR professional, I have had the opportunity to launch and manage several internship programs in the organizations I have worked at over the years. In each organization, these internship programs have beene valuable recruiting tools for nurturing and building future talent pipeline. The added advantage being that current employees get the opportunity to mentor and coach interns thereby gaining leadership experience and skills.

We have consistently run internship programs at Knowles every year and have greatly benefited from the contributions of these interns. In multiple cases, we have been able to hire these interns as fulltime employees following their graduation. I could go on and on about how seamless the onboarding is for these new fulltime employees since they already have knowledge about company products, technology, people, org structure, processes and systems. 

Of course, I have been a great advocate for internship programs as an HR professional. This summer I got to experience internship programs from a different perspective. From a parent’s perspective. When my daughter secured a 10-week marketing internship at a credit union after her first year of college, I was very proud of her for landing this opportunity just one year after high school graduation. However, I was nervous as I felt my daughter didn’t know anything about financial institutions let alone about a credit union. She had not taken any marketing or accounting courses yet in college. I worried she would struggle and may drop out mid-way if things got too difficult. I wasn’t even sure she could survive one week of sitting in a cube for eight hours!

I saw her confidence grow each week as she sat in staff meetings, met members of other teams and got assigned to do competitive analysis one week and feature analysis another week. Every evening over dinner, she spoke enthusiastically about how her manager listened to her ideas or how she got to present to the Marketing Team and how engaged they seem by asking her follow up questions. Her manager even asked her to contribute to the company blog telling her that she was good at writing. She was now getting feedback which until now was limited to grades. 

She was beyond excited (and nervous) to learn she would be presenting to the company’s executive team. As an HR professional while I have appreciated that these interactions were important for the leadership team to know what the interns were doing, I did not realize how valuable these interactions are for someone in college. Each question asked by the leadership team in these meeting or the simple act of listening to an intern can help increase an intern’s confidence and provide them encouragement.

This summer my daughter learnt about banking, interest rates, 3-point spread, overdraft, how Gen Y and Gen Z differ in their habits when it comes to budgeting and accessibility. And I learnt how valuable the internship experience is for college students to gain confidence, get affirmation and learn that with commitment and effort, they can learn new things and adapt to a new environment. I need to apply my own learning as a parent from my daughter’s internship experience to my HR/Corporate self and help interns accomplsh what my daughter accomplished. A brand new confidence!