The Value of Being a Student Intern
Should You Pursue an Internship as a Student? Yes!
The biggest difference between a full-time internship during the summer and an internship during the semester is the balance necessary between classes and work. The ability to juggle both college classes and an internship is a challenge, but it’s definitely manageable. Earlier in the semester, I wrote a piece for the Achieving our Greatness Intern Story detailing my advice on fitting an internship into a college course schedule. Now, as my final year of undergraduate education comes to an end, I have been reflecting on the ways that my coursework and internship have blended together seamlessly. Upon this reflection, I have come to realize the true benefits of having an internship while at school are innumerable. Even though scheduling and time management can be a challenge as a student, it is a unique experience for a continuous and strengthened learning experience.
I was fortunate enough to learn first-hand about effective management in my internship, while also attending lectures on the same topic in the classroom. The importance of the different communication methods we use at Skillsoft, such as townhalls, came to life in my Strategic Leadership course in school. Strategic Leadership is a required course that satisfies my business management concentration. I could have never predicted how perfectly it would align with the work I was simultaneously engaging in at Skillsoft. I was fortunate enough to help plan the internal communications associated with a huge change within our company’s value system. In the meantime, I was also working on assignments, collaborating on projects, and listening to lectures in my Strategic Leadership class on managing change initiatives in an organization as a leader. I was adding methods to my toolkit, like Kotter’s 8 Steps to managing a change and the STAR model to defining your change’s strategy. Our class detailed the importance of vision alignment through an organization’s mission and strategy, learnings that I would take with me to my internal communications project after class at Skillsoft. We also talked about other key organizational characteristics from the perspective of a manager, such as culture, that cross referenced the trends I was seeing in my workplace as we moved through mergers and acquisitions. The coincidental alignment of this course with my internship brought me a new perspective on the power of the topics that we discussed in class that I otherwise would not have realized. Coincidences like this made the effort and time management I had to learn as a student intern worthwhile, because they helped me truly absorb the content I was learning in class through application at my internship.
Similarly, my other courses helped me build a toolkit to use in my internship and beyond. In Marketing Research and Analytic Technology, I would learn about methods to surveying target populations, then sit in on meetings at Skillsoft about market reports with similarly aggregated data. I would learn about the importance of problem formulation and frameworks to problem solving, then apply them to my projects in my internship. In my Promotions course, I found myself reminding my teammates to keep our promotional materials in line with our client’s brand as we built out an integrated marketing campaign, which was a direct result of the perspective I gained as a member of the creative and branding team at Skillsoft. Although this all might sound unique to my courses and experience, I believe that any student intern will uncover similar nuances when working in the real world and learning in class.
Lastly, I realized that not ignoring classes outside of my major had a huge payoff to my internship work and professional development. I was always eager to start taking marketing and business classes as a fourth year after spending my first half of college gaining required liberal arts credits, and it’s hard to feel like your non-major courses are beneficial. However, as I begin my career and have spent time in professional settings, I have realized the importance of immersing myself in a wide array of subjects. For example, in a psychology course, I learned about implicit behaviors like body language and facial cues. In a cultural anthropology class, I learned how to better conduct myself when engaging with people from different backgrounds and differences in cultural behaviors. These classes shaped my perspective as a young professional, despite me not working directly in these domains. So many dynamics operate in the workplace in a marketing or business career, like management styles, relationship structures, and working alongside new people. I have found it beneficial in my internship to have a vast array of knowledge in my toolkit.
Being able to practice and engage with the themes I learn in the classroom while being an intern has truly made this experience worthwhile. I have enjoyed my marketing curriculum and my internship so much, which has made me excited about my future and confident in my chosen career path. To other students who may be contemplating either being an intern while being a student, or what career they should pursue after graduation, I would recommend a finding an applicable learning experience such as this one. You can retain more information by being immersed in your learning, in and out of the classroom. Even though having classes and an intern schedule to juggle may be intimidating, do not let it stop you from having this unique opportunity to grow.
