Designing My Own Internship
When I was a junior in college, I was stuck. I was a Communications major sitting in a classroom. Sure, I was learning about concepts and theory, but I wasn’t learning who I wanted to be after college, where I wanted to go, or the type of job that I wanted. I decided to take action.
I applied and got a three month competitive internship with Organic Valley, a farmer owned cooperative know for it’s delicious dairy products with around 800 employees. I was excited! Finally, a chance to learn about the workplace in a real way and discover my strengths and weaknesses. I was the Farmers Advocating For Organics intern, and would be working on our farmer grant program.
However, one week into the internship, my supervisor told me that she was leaving the cooperative. That wouldn’t be a huge deal, except that it was only myself and her in the department. She left, and I was alone in my own department, completely new to the company. It wasn’t exactly what I had pictured for my internship experience. I started reporting to the company’s head lawyer. I sped through my internship duties faster than expected, and was left with no work, coming in day after day, finding odd jobs to do like filing paper work. I was being helpful to the company, but not in a way that met any of my own needs to find meaningful work.
Bored and eager, I asked my supervisor if I could explore other projects in the company, since she didn’t have any for me. She agreed, and I started to grab coffee with anyone who had an interesting job that was related to communications. Eventually, I found three people who needed help on their teams and I started to take on projects for them. My internship title no longer mattered. I was working with multiple departments on different projects. I had designed my own internship into exactly what I wanted it to be, which was cooler than any internship I could have been offered.
I planned employee events and wrote company newsletters with the Culture team. I helped set up a database for farmers to communicate and share ideas with the Farmer Communications team. I proposed and implemented a grant management software for our Mission, Messaging, and Media team to manage the millions they give away in donations.
I loved taking on the variety of work in multiple departments. It matched my personality perfectly, as I enjoy working on complex projects that allow me to show my creativity and be a self starter. As an extrovert, building relationships with different people on multiple teams felt natural to me, and energized me to do my best work. I learned that my favorite projects to work on were company events. I loved bringing people together through in-person experiences to help build a strong employee culture. The work was also a mix of computer work and in person execution, which I also appreciated as an extrovert. I helped run a Halloween themed event, a Wellness fair, and created a communications plan for an award we won: one of “Outside Magazine’s Best Places to Work”. Here are a couple of fun photos of a project I did as part of the communications plan. It was a card that every employee found on their desk on a Monday morning, announcing the award.


After the three months ended, I was offered two separate internships in the company, and decided to stay with the Culture team. I eventually moved onto my dream internship: The Community Engagement internship where I helped execute our booth presence at Expo West, the largest natural and organic trade show in the US. What started out as a three month internship turned into an entire year with the company.
Looking back, none of that would have happened if I hadn’t taken my internship experience into my own hands. No one was telling me to take on more work. No one expected more from me. I expected more from me. I learned that no one will really choose you in life. You have to choose yourself. No one was going out of their way to make me succeed and have the best internship experience possible. They shouldn’t need to, that’s my responsibility. I learned that you can’t just wait for an opportunity to fall in your lap. You have to seek them out, and make them happen for yourself.
Forget about waiting and hoping, choose yourself.
