How To Get More Value Out Of Your Internship
After 6 months of interning at a digital marketing agency in NYC, I thought…If this is what the real world looks like, then it’s not so bad after all.
To start, I grew up in New Jersey and was never really exposed to the hustle and fast-paced movement often seen in a city like New York. After a week into the internship, I knew the people around me were different. There were more entrepreneurs in the office than I could count, and the open floor plan emphasized the future of what office workspace will look like.
The internship gave me a new perspective on “success”. I learned for us to achieve, we must surround ourselves with the right people. Coming from a small town in New Jersey, I was eager to be around hustlers, entrepreneurs, and engineers. Of course, I was also excited to be a social media intern.. but come on you can’t beat the first reason.
It’s one thing to read about entrepreneurship, but seeing cryptocurrency companies, start-ups, and designers all under one building left me at awe. Here, I learned the future of work is dependent on humans doing their best work, not human robots functioning in an hourly matter. In order to do good work, you must love not only your job but also the people you put in the hours with.
They say to step out of your comfort zone… everything around me was more than uncomfortable. However, as humans, we must adapt.
Internships are beneficial because it gives you a macro-view of the field you aspire to be in. It gets your hands a little dirty and also opens your network.
If given enough time to pass the learning curve, you can do extraordinary things you didn’t think you would be capable of. The right internships are the ones that nurture you, teach you, and of course, pays you.
We’re sent to school to learn and most of us expect we can just easily apply the knowledge gained from tests to be sufficient in the real world. In reality, you learn more by doing, collaborating, and making mistakes.
Mentorship
If you fail at a project, which you will… stand back up. Failure is Inevitable. Coming into the internship, I truly believed I knew my stuff. To make my ego even worse, I oversold myself in the beginning. The saying goes,
“Underpromise and overdeliver”.
My first few projects were dissected to every last mistake. Some mistakes were controllable; alignments, composition, and some were just flaws you would only those with expertise could point out. If your employer’s heart is at the right place, they would be okay early on- that’s the point of being nurtured.
The best mentors I learned, are the ones that are willing to give you feedback. To gain feedback, you must be coachable.
Collaboration will soon lead to independence.
Workplace relationships are not that much different from real-life relationships. In order for both parties to get along, there must be a fine line between what is acceptable. At the end of the day, the boss gets final say… do everything you can to meet their standards. Early on, this was a hard pill to swallow.
My lesson is this, businesses have emotions too. The managers, owners, anybody above you has their own tastes. Your work should embody the business while still adding your own flavor to it.
As time goes, you as the intern, start to drift off from relying on feedback. Why? You’ve established the fundamentals of what the business expects. Once you start working independently, you start to blossom.
Learning Curve
So what’s going behind the scenes of your internship? Most likely, they’re looking at your overall improvement. Compound investing. The challenge for all interns is how fast we can get past the learning curve. To me, that’s what separates you and the rest of the herd. How fast can you take the information given and implement it in your work?
- Fail openly. My work improved when I collaborated with those around me. By doing this, you and your employer can witness improvements first hand. If I just kept my mistakes to myself, my employer would not have seen the increments of improvement. By the end of the internship, paying attention to small details has been engraved into my work. When thinking about collaboration, most don’t realize that when you’re consistently working with another person, you start to gain pieces of them.
- After-hours. Entrepreneurship is celebrated all over the country… so why not put in some hours after work? To get over the learning curve at a faster rate, I found time to practice my skills on the train rides home and got my hands on any industry-related articles. Whether it was practicing photoshop or reading socialmediatoday, I wanted to put myself in the best possible position to grow exponentially.
- Don’t hold back and ask questions. The trick with this is asking the right questions. There are two types of questions: ones that could easily be googled and those only with expertise could answer. The second type of question is obviously the best kind to ask. By asking questions, it shows you care.
Love your job.
Work will consume most of your life, it’s only fitting to do what you love. Having passion in your work gets you through the tougher times. You start to ignore your commute time and unnecessary arguments.
The most important thing about being an intern is all about getting your feet wet in the industry. Is this really something you want to do for most of your life? The more internships you get, the more layers of the industry you can peel off. Marketing has many different branches. Health has several different occupations. Allow yourself to see a glimpse of your future.
An added tip, find a way to implement work into your life. Earlier, I talked about working after hours. I call that forced work. The other side of the spectrum is your own time. As a social media intern, it was easy to integrate work and life. On LinkedIn, I started to share updated articles about my industry. The article you’re reading now is an example of combining both my internship and life. Thanks to my time as an intern, I picked up a hobby of writing. Open yourself to the countless possibilities.
Stand Out
Find a way to stand out. Not just in your work, but also on a personal level. Establish friendships with those around you; a workplace does not have to feel like a prison. Did you forget that your co-workers are people too? Trust me, there’s nothing wrong with workplace friendships. If I could rewind five months ago, I would engage much more than I did. I was so attached to the hustle, that I forgot the most basic human need- interactions.
Maybe by loving our jobs, we can finally answer mom when she asks, “how was your day?”
