4 Ways to Engage Professionally Beyond a Summer Internship
Staying productive in a virtual summer
The Unprecedented Times
As early as mid-March, tech companies started to make drastic changes to their summer internship plans as the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in full force. Yelp was one of the first well-known tech companies to cancel their summer internship program, leaving many students scrambling to find another opportunity.
In the next few months, many other companies cancelled (TravelAdvisor, Groupon, Airbnb) or shortened their summer internships (JP Morgan, Lyft). The remaining internships were reformatted to be remote. Mine rapidly followed suit; my own summer internship at Goldman Sachs as a Summer Technology Analyst was reduced to 5 weeks from the original 10 weeks, now beginning in July. My summer plans flipped upside down.
Don’t get me wrong, I am extremely grateful to still be employed. However, I found myself with an unexpected 6 weeks of free-time after I wrapped up my 3-rd year of undergrad at Brown. I was definitely not moving to New York City (or going anywhere else) anytime soon. Besides relocating back to my home in Southern California, I now had to adapt quickly with the expectation to work remotely.
I knew I wanted to take advantage of this time expand my network, meet other college interns, and gain product management skills for full-time recruitment. After many hours of scrolling LinkedIn and chatting with strangers, I found 4 ways to be effective in engaging professionally for a college student beyond a summer internship, such that you can gain more career-relevant skills from this virtual summer.
Post on LinkedIn
People have always told me networking is key in obtaining a dream job and putting myself out there only works in my favor. After being inactive on LinkedIn for months, I decided to post about my job update and other extracurriculars for the summer, along with appropriate hashtags (#excited) and tagging the people/organizations involved. Shockingly, my post received 14800+ views and increased my profile visits by 600% in that week.
As an introvert, I am so nervous about cold-mailing strangers online. However, seeing people noticing my profiles and personally reaching out inspired me to do the same. I started adding other tech interns from Goldman and posted more about my endeavors with Product Buds. I significantly increased my connections, and successfully let my network know that I am staying productive during my time off.
Being active on LinkedIn is one of the most practical, actionable, and accessible ways for a college student to market themselves to a wide-audience — especially in the age of virtual recruiting.
Knowing how to utilize social media is crucial now because companies will no longer conduct on-site interviews or sponsor career fairs in the Fall. Let your network know what you are up to and how you are keeping busy.
Join Intern or Career-Based Communities
With the summer being fully virtual, college students are missing out on the most important aspect of any internship — being able to experience the company culture and interact with other interns/full-time employees in person. Sometimes in big cities, interns will even get to meet with interns of other companies. Several student-led online communities have risen to tackle this challenge, aiming to provide college students with a platform to network with others, learn from industry speakers, and enjoy fun events.
Intern.club is a 3,000+ member, global, intern community on Slack with various initiatives like organizing company weekends, side projects, and diversity panels. I recently helped to co-host a Women in Tech Leadership panel and have planned a Game of Thrones Trivia Night. In addition, I had calls with interns across the nation to learn about their journey and simply make new friends.
Product Buds is a 1000+ member community for aspiring product managers. I am most involved with the Book Club where I read Inspired by Marty Cagan in June and later got promoted to Moderator for the July reading cycle. With this leadership role, I was able to gained direct PM skills like meeting facilitation, user empathy, and implementing a service. Other activities offered included interview practice and case studies workshops.
There are many other intern communities out there, but I personally found these above organizations to be the most organized and helpful to my professional aspirations.
Work on a Passion Project
If you have the time and confidence to complete a high-quality project, this is the perfect summer to do so. You get to take full ownership of a product and make friends with your teammates. While you are developing software, you are also developing character, resiliency, and research skills.
Cultivating passion is cultivating success.
Most college students have trouble with effectively managing their time, and a productive summer can easily fall through due to procrastination and other distractions. Thus, I strongly recommend creating a project timeline before taking off in a hunch. Plan ahead. Set realistic and reachable goals. Don’t overcommit yourself or feel pressured to work with a group. I am not discouraging working on a side-project, but if you still had an internship, the priority should always be succeeding in the internship.
I personally chose to not do a side-project because I was more interested in networking and spending time with family. There are definitely other ways to gain a side-project experience: brushing up on coding basics, learning a new language or developer tool, and expanding on a school project.
Return to What Invigorates You
Learn a new recipe. Pick up the book that you never had time to read. Play party games via Zoom with your friends. Do what relaxes you.
According to a CNBC article, Mark Zuckerberg believes that having hobbies show future employers that you have the passion and drive. Today, it is very common for recruiters to ask about your hobbies during an interview.
In a personal context, indulging in hobbies will also positively impact your mental and physical health. Doing so reduces stress and helps you achieve higher work performance, a win-win situation for everyone.
Even more, in our hobbies we can potentially find that which we can turn into a larger project, something that we may bring into our professional lives.
There is no reason to stop doing what you love out of a fear of being unproductive.
