Mules. Corporate Trainees. It's Internship Season; Share Your Best (And Worst) Stories

After my broadcast class ended, I gathered my stuff quickly and lightly jogged up to our speaker, a news executive at CNN. At the time, I was pursuing my master's degree in journalism and was eager to get some experience at a major news outlet. I expressed interest in interning there and she told me to contact her. I did. A couple months later, I was waking up at 5 a.m. for CNN’s American Morning show where I transcribed video, assisted with packages and cut stock video.

I’ve held several internships in my life, many of which came about because I muted that nervous being inside of me and spoke up, making my desire for experience known. 

Not all of my internships turned out to be the greatest (mainly the ones where I was unpaid), but they all provided the experience in the journalism career I was building.

Whether you’ve honed a heap of skills during your internship or experienced “sweat shop” conditions, we’re inviting you to share your story on LinkedIn using the hashtag #Interning somewhere in the body of the post.

What made your internship the best (or the worst)? Ever landed an internship through non-traditional means? Explain how you did it. What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned during your internship? Describe a day in the life of being an intern. How have your past internships prepared you for your current role? 

Whether you're a current or former intern, join the conversation by writing your own post. Here’s what some LinkedIn members wrote about internships:

Before becoming a tech editorial intern at Business Insider, Northwestern University student Celena Chong could be found interviewing a spoken-word artist or wandering the streets of Chicago looking for a story. Now, she writes,: 

I’m sitting with a cluster of interns typing at a savage rate. I’m scheduling interviews with CEOs on my Google Calendar, posting articles as fast as I’d blog, and refreshing my Feedly at a fever pitch to see if something’s bleeping on the radar. I’m wearing a coiffed blazer for the first time in my life, and sometimes I close my eyes and I’m Arianna Huffington giving a lowly intern some side-eye.

Read Celena's full post here, which offers insight into her experience at BI.

Samantha Yi interned with her parents' law firm before taking a summer internship working with the CEO of The Chicago Community Trust. 

My father is known by colleagues and peers to be a strict boss. He will send back any paper with even one grammatical error accompanied by an angry email.

Samantha often wondered why people stayed and worked for her parents despite the long hours and a demanding the boss. The answer to that was something that informed her belief about what's most important in a job. Read her story here. 

Marriott full-timer and a VP leading the company's global team of creatives and strategists David Beebe wrote:

I've had the opportunity to work with a number of interns. Some were just going through the motions while others were fully dedicated to their time at the company and wanted to learn as much as they could. I've even learned that the most valuable thing you can do is give them your time - everything from regular one on one meetings to informal lunches.

To gain insight about what college students look for in companies, David turned to his intern Ryan Joffe. Read the full Q&A here. 

Need more ideas? Follow the stories here, then check out LinkedIn’s new student editorial calendar filled with monthly writing themes for students and millennials.

If you're a student, you can learn more about publishing on LinkedIn here.