A sea of college students are preparing to start summer internships, which are a crucial way to get much-needed experience before graduation. But simply having an internship isn’t enough; you also need to impress your employer, form solid relationships with your co-workers, and pay attention to what’s happening around you.
Over at U.S. News & World Report today, I talk about how to get the most out of your internship. You can read it here.
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A reader writes:
We have a very small company and recently took on our first (paid) interns, and we’re having some issues managing. There is regular last-minute calling in/not showing up, other types of behaviors that are not ideal (falling asleep in a “boring” meeting). They also ask regularly press for permanent jobs, which we directly addressed at their interviews and a few times since. After discussing it a time (or two, or five) very early on, I believe they should be a bit more concerned with trying to make their work and work habits demonstrative of their long-term value as employees to us.
I know these issues need to be addressed by us as the managers. For the future, we’re wondering if you have any advice for how to avoid these problems from the beginning. We are a small and casual office, employee handbooks and the like seem unnecessary. We would rather not have to police entry-level employees, but basic expectations about calling in or changing hours in excess seem obvious. Is that an unreasonable expectation? Should we sit down with new employees and outline expectations about schedule, sick days, etc.?
Thank you for any guidance you can offer us!
It’s obvious to you, but it’s clearly not obvious to them. So yes, you need to sit down and discuss expectations about schedules, sick days, and so forth right at the start. Like, the first day. Do it as part of an overall orientation to the internship, and include the stuff I’ve outlined here too.
Part of the point of an internship is to start getting experience in how an office works — because by definition, when someone doesn’t have a ton of experience in office life, they really don’t know how things work. Things that seem obvious to you are often not going to be obvious to interns. You are doing them a favor by spelling things out explicitly in the beginning, so that they know from the start (rather than being told partway in that they’re doing it wrong). This means, as silly as it might seem, explaining things like “you’re expected to be here every day, on time, except if you’re sick or you’ve cleared it with me ahead of time” and “if you’re not able to come in, please call and let us know before 9 a.m.” and “you need to call with that message, not text it,” and “please keep the use of social networking sites to a minimum during the day” and so forth.
Many, many interns really don’t know this stuff. It’s part of the price you pay for hiring really cheap labor; you get to teach it to them. And then, in the future, this internship is going to help them get a better job, because that employer is going to see they’ve had this office experience and figure that someone has already taught them the really basic stuff. And that someone is you.
And while you shouldn’t need to say “don’t fall asleep in meetings” from the start, if it does happen you need to address it immediately, firmly and clearly: ”Falling asleep in a meeting is rude to the other people in the meeting and makes you look unprofessional and like you don’t care to be here. It will have a terrible impact on your reputation. You need to make sure that doesn’t happen again.” And then if it happens again? You need to seriously consider replacing that intern, because that’s really not okay. That intern is displaying a disregard for your and her work, and it’s almost certainly showing up in other ways too.
By the way, regarding the pressing for permanent jobs, it concerns me that this has come up five times at this point. Either you’re not being clear or firm enough, or you have some seriously pushy interns on your hands. If you haven’t already, tell them very clearly what it would take for them to be considered for a permanent job — whether it’s five solid months of excellent work (describing what that means) or whatever. Or if it’s unlikely to happen at all because you don’t often have openings that they’d be a strong fit for, tell them that too. And once you’ve explained that, if they continue to press you, point out that you’ve already talked about it and find out if you’re being unclear, or they’re not taking you at your word, or what.
Anyway, back to your question about avoiding this in the future: Be really clear about basic expectations from the start, especially about things like schedules and time off. Pretend that you’re dealing with strangers to our planet who don’t know the culture or our norms, because in some ways, you are!
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Over at the Intuit QuickBase blog today, I give some tips on managing your interns, including finding out what they’re hoping to get out of the experience so you can help them get it; assuming they won’t know some really basic stuff about how offices work and giving more guidance than you normally would; and not cutting them too much slack just becuase they’re not being paid much.
You can read all the details here.
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Periodically, I like to throw out a question to readers to answer. Here’s one for you to tackle — and the story is long and juicy. Have at it in the comments…
I work in a field that’s big on mentoring — at one point or another, everyone in my field had to intern. In fact, the program I graduated from requires a 6-week internship in the final year. I had some great experiences that really helped shape my career as an intern, so now that I’m doing well and am in a position to pay it forward, I did. After giving a skype-talk to students at the university I graduated from, I was contacted by one of them asking to intern with me. She was quite aggressive and had a lengthy portfolio and resume, as well as good references from people I trust at the university, so I agreed.
I’m based overseas, and I explained to her multiple times that while she’s welcome to come, my company was not able to cover her travel or living costs while here, nor were we able to pay her for the internship (this isn’t uncommon — most internships in my field are unpaid). I said this to her verbally as well as in writing, and my manager repeated this information as well.
I work from home, so in the interest of giving her the best experience, we worked out that she’d be based with me for the first half, then go with me to the main office in another city, where she’d finish the internship. At some point in the lead up to this, she asked if she could stay at my house while she was job shadowing me, and somehow, in a fit of wanting to help her out, I agreed.
Once she arrived, it quickly went downhill. I discovered that not only had she not booked any sort of hotel in the other city she’d be staying in, but she hadn’t even researched costs in that city — and it’s pricey, and lacking in hostels or other cheap, safe ammenities. While, during work hours, she was flipping out about this, I gave her a couple of possible solutions and reassured her as much as I could, and came up with a solution that I’d actually used when I first moved overseas to that city.
I gave her a few tasks, and was generally unimpressed — it took her far longer than it should, and she didn’t even bother to spellcheck her work before submitting it to me. But I thought “ok, she’s young and it’s her first day.” I also looked the other way when she asked me or my flatmates repeatedly about the “party” scene in our city and seemed more interested in going out and meeting guys than, you know, working. Her first day, I cited first-day jitters and jet lag for the weird behavior. But over the next two days it plummeted even more. Not only was she not performing (to the point I had to basically spoon feed her every tiny task, and was told by my flatmate that, while I was out on work meetings, she’d come back home for lunch at noon to find the intern. . . still asleep), but I had several panicked phone calls from the university — turns out the intern was sending back emails to them basically freaking out that she couldn’t afford this internship, and it was my, my company, and the university’s responsibility to make sure she could. Emails she’d also sent to my boss.
Meanwhile, two days away from home and she was sobbing and crying in my living room . . . The final straw, however, was when one of her friends back home started tweeting about how dare my company not pay our interns and expect them to shell out x amounts for the pleasure of being our slaves, how dare I, personally, treat her this way, and what a horrible horrible company and organization we were to do this to the poor girl. . . tagging both myself, the university, and my company. We’re a media company, so our Twitter feeds are actually part of our online brand and we have thousands of followers. Who all got to see this vitriol. Including my boss’s boss, when our web guy, confused as to what this was, alerted other managers to it, trying to find the culprit so we could get the posts deleted. When both I and the school contacted the intern, she didn’t seem to see why this behavior was such a big deal — and she declined to get her friend to remove the posts.
We had no choice; we had to fire her. I felt horrible about it, and she left … taking with her work she hadn’t completed, as well as my spare phone I’d lent her for her stay. And for the next two weeks more posts went up from her and her friend, tagging my company, about how horrible we all were, how unprofessional, and how I should be fired.
Fast forward several weeks and she’s back home, trying to find another internship (she needs the credit to graduate, and while if she had completed the projects I’d given her I would have counted the week she was with, since she finished barely half a day’s work in total with me, I just couldn’t), as well as get a job post-graduation. And since her blog and online portfolio which she’s sending out still says she’s going to be interning with my company, and my field back home is fairly small, I’ve gotten a few calls.
My questions are: what responsibility do I have to this girl and her new employers? It’s possible she just freaked out completely — people at the university say this behavior was out of character for her — how much tale-telling am I allowed or obligated to do? I am totally disgusted with her behavior and her friend’s behavior, who both seem to have come out of this feeling self righteous and put upon. I’m 26, I’m on facebook, twitter, etc and I’m careful about it. . . but these kids, barely younger than me, seem to think they can do or say anything they want, and that offends me. Moreover, they have both damaged my credibility with my company — not only did they behave badly on my watch, but they tarnished the reputation of the institution my degree comes from. What can I do to repair that? And is there anything I can do to make sure these two children don’t do this again to someone else? I wasn’t fired — although if I had written those tweets I could have been — but the next person might not be so lucky. Finally, as someone whose name and reputation is crucial to my field, it’s now still sitting out there in cyberland that I’m some sort of horrible unprofessional ogre. What can I do?
Readers?
Want to read an update to this post? The reader’s update in December 2011 is here.
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Check out this amusing email string from a bumbling but very enthusiastic JP Morgan summer intern.
The sequence of events:
1. He sends an all-staff email encouraging people to attend a happy hour that night, noting that the bar “is not strict on IDs so if you have a fake you will be fine. If you don’t have an ID… get one!” (The underlining and bolding is his, not mine.) He also notes that it’s “going to be wild.”
The email is marked High Importance.
2. Clearly having been reprimanded, 28 minutes later he sends a follow-up email, which says, “I realized this is not the place to use company time to talk about after work events.” But don’t worry, because “I will be reaching you from my other email, after work hours from now on.”
3. About an hour later, there’s a third follow-up, this time asserting that the bar is in fact for those 21 and up only.
This is why it’s good to intern before you graduate, so you can get anything like this out of your system before you have a salary at stake.
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A reader writes:
I am a recent graduate searching for my first job. I am going to apply for a position at the nonprofit I interned at last summer, but for a different department. I am confident that when HR contacts the department I interned for, I will get good reviews. On the evaluation I scored “superior” on all but a few categories, scoring “proficient” in the other ones. Upon leaving, I did everything a good intern was supposed to do–I said my good-byes and gave everyone I worked with on a daily basis a thank-you card. I was invited to keep in contact with them and I told them I would.
Back to school…always having been very shy with keeping up relationships, I did not keep in contact with them because I felt reluctant updating them on my life when I didn’t feel like my mundane activities was “worth” updating. I realize my mistake and regret it.
My question: should I reconnect with them or no? If I should, how do I do it without looking desperate or manipulative?
My dilemma: I do not want to appear desperate by contacting them when I’m “conveniently” applying now (it’s been almost a year since I started the internship). If I got the job, I wouldn’t want that reputation of “using” or only talking to people for future advantages.
I may be dramatic in thinking this, but if I don’t reconnect, I’m afraid that they may feel offended when they do find out that I applied for a position in the company and didn’t think to contact them.
Another downside, is that HR may think “if she liked it so much, why didn’t she keep in contact?” Still not a good reason to justify losing contact, I’m interested in the company and am for its mission, I just didn’t see myself in that department (since the organization has two different responsibilities).
Yes, you need to reconnect with them now. It would be weird to apply for a position in another part of their organization without reaching out to them — not least because they can (and probably would want to) put in a good word for you.
Should you have kept in touch with them all along? Yes. Is it less-than-ideal to resume contact now, when you’re applying for a job there, than it would have been earlier? Sure. But it’s really not a big deal. People aren’t going to think about this very much. They’re most likely to just think “Oh, it’s nice to hear from her” and then move on to something else — they’re not going to spend time thinking dark things about you because you weren’t in touch earlier.
And HR isn’t going to spend much time wondering why you didn’t keep in contact either. You’re probably over-thinking this, frankly. Get back in touch and don’t worry about it!
But do stay in touch with coworkers in the future, and don’t feel shy about sending updates. You may think your life isn’t worth updating them on, but lots of people take a real interest in hearing what former interns are doing and how they’re making their way in the world. Updates can be as simple as “I’m taking classes in X and Y and trying to figure out what I want to do with my life,” or “I thought of you yesterday because I wrote a paper about Y.” And you can also use these people as sounding boards for professional advice — most people are flattered by being asked for advice.
Good luck!
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A reader writes:
I recently accepted a position as an unpaid intern at a nonprofit. Fresh out of grad school with an MA and a significant amount of debt, at my interview I requested that I be reimbursed for travel. The person who hired me agreed to compensate me; the amount added up to about $15 a week, which was a significant sum to me at the time.
After a month at the internship during which I was doing perfectly adequate work and gearing up to start an independent project, my supervisor set up a meeting with me. She praised my work and then told me that they just passed a new budget and could no longer compensate me for travel. I told her that I still wanted to stay at the internship, but would have to reduce the number of days that I came in from twice a week to once a week.
When I came back after the weekend my supervisor told me that since I was no longer coming in for 15 hours a week I was not satisfying the minimal requirements for the internship and that I had to either come in twice a week as before or stop coming in. I explained again that I could not afford to pay money to work, thanked her for the opportunity and left the internship.
I think that my supervisor should have found the $60 a month in the budget rather than rescind my travel stipend and feel completely justified in terminating the internship since they reneged on our agreement. (She managed to find $50 for a gift certificate to B&N to give me as a going away gift, which I would have gladly traded for another month of experience). I also feel that there’s something exploitative about employers not providing a basic stipend (travel and possibly lunch) even in an unpaid internship. I understand that I am gaining experience, but I am also contributing value to your organization or company and I should not have to pay to work for you! This is the norm for nonprofit organizations. I wanted to know how you feel about what happened to me and about the state of the unpaid internship in general.
I’m sorry this happened to you! On the bright side though, it sounds like you learned something extra from this internship: that you’ve got to get every part of a job offer in writing. Must, must, must. Employers can still change the terms of your employment later on, even with a written offer (unless you have a contract, which most people don’t), but getting your offer in writing dramatically strengthens the likelihood that the terms of your employment will be what you agreed to. After all, what if your interviewer agrees to give you Tuesday afternoons off, but she leaves the company a few weeks later and her replacement doesn’t know anything about that agreement and doesn’t care to stick to it? Being able to show a written agreement in that context isn’t foolproof, but it’s hugely helpful. So next time do that.
As for this particular situation, I’m skeptical that your manager couldn’t find the $60/month for your travel stipend. That’s pretty unlikely. What’s more likely is that that one of the following happened:
1. Someone in that organization is very rules-oriented and insisted on enforcing their “we don’t do travel stipends” policy, despite the fact that they’d already promised it to you. And/or they got concerned about doing a travel stipend for one intern but not for others.
2. Your manager was unhappy with your work and as a result became annoyed that they were paying your travel expenses, and wasn’t honest enough to talk to you about her concerns. (I have no idea if this was the case — but describing your own work as “perfectly adequate” isn’t necessarily a great sign.)
3. Your manager is simply inept and bumbling.
I don’t know which of these three it is, but those are your most likely possibilities. Regardless, I agree that you were justified in withdrawing from the internship once they changed the terms.
As for unpaid internships in general, well, they’re not for everyone. They can be great at a stage in your career when being able to put that experience on your resume can make the difference between getting interviews and not getting interviews. So they often have real value. But they’re not feasible for everyone, since not everyone is in a position to work for free or is willing to. (On the other hand, if you’re not working anyway because no one will hire you, taking an unpaid internship might be a way to change that.)
Really, you need to decide for yourself if you’re interested in doing an unpaid internship or not; either decision is legitimate. I disagree that they’re exploitative though; no one is making you take the job, and you’re entering into the agreement with full understanding and of your own free will. And I’ve heard from way more people who are glad they did their unpaid internships than who aren’t.
Additionally, volunteerism is a big element in nonprofit work, and unpaid internships are in many respects longer-term structured volunteer roles, with the added benefit that they can be real resume builders. (This assumes you’re interning at a nonprofit, of course, as unpaid labor at for-profit employers is illegal unless the net benefit is to the volunteer.)
Really, the issue you’ve got here isn’t about unpaid internships; it’s about the terms of your employment being changed on you — at which point it was completely reasonable to walk away.
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If you’re thinking about leaving college without doing a couple of internships, don’t. You will be at a huge disadvantage if you emerge into the post-grad world without work experience.
But it’s also not enough simply to do a few internships. You also need to be impressive during your time there.
Over at U.S. News & World Report today, I offer 10 tips for getting the most out of your internship. Check it out here.
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I’m hiring college students for several internships right now, which means that the candidates are a mix of really impressive/prepared and really … not. Lessons from just this past week:
1. Don’t send poetry as your writing sample. It doesn’t matter how good it is; it’s not relevant to the kind of writing I need to see. It’s just one step removed from sending me an audio file of you playing the piano as your writing sample.
2. When you answer the phone and sound surprised to hear from me, which prompts me to ask if you were expecting my call (which was pre-scheduled), don’t say, “I just forgot that it was Thursday.”
3. Don’t tell me when I call for our phone interview (again, pre-scheduled) that you haven’t looked at the job description since you applied and thus can’t remember much about the job.
4. Don’t respond to an email asking if you’re free for a phone interview at 2:00 Wednesday with an email saying “Yes, anytime Thursday is good for me.”
5. Don’t include in your cover letter a link to your blog about your chronic masturbation habit. (Okay, that one was old but I needed a fifth and it’s an all-time best.)
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A reader writes:
I wrote to you about whether or not to extend my internship back in April (from the Should I Extend My Internship post) and thought I could share with you an update. After much pondering about weighing the pros and cons of doing so, I decided to go ahead and extend my internship. Yes, same internship, same manager too. I am just about to wrap up my internship and as I reflect back on whether or not it was a good choice, I believe that it was. I took the advice you gave about working on long-term projects and it did help a lot. I was able to do several projects on my own without a whole lot of assistance from my manager.
The only thing that gave me second thoughts about it was that I did feel as if I stuck around for too long. It’s almost been a year now with the extension. I know I will not get a job offer from this organization due to a lot of budget cutbacks. One other thing, I didn’t really have much of a mentor-mentee relationship with my manager as I had before. There were a few things I wanted my manager/mentor’s advice on about my career goals, but I guess I just didn’t feel comfortable approaching my mentor for advice anymore or maybe it was just the lack of time issue.
But overall despite the time issue, I think my manager is still one of the greatest mentors I’ve had. I did get a thank you gift and letter. I also do plan on staying in touch. Any advice on saying goodbye or what would be good questions or topics to say for that “final conversation?”
Yes! This is a really great opportunity to get feedback that can help you develop professionally. I’d ask things like:
* Do you have thoughts on where I did especially well and what things I should focus on improving in? (If you don’t get a real answer to the last part of this when you first ask it, reiterate that you truly want to know. Some people get more honest when you make it clear you’re not going to be offended. If she still won’t tell you, phrase it this way: “If you could wave a magic wand over my head and tweak something about my habits or skills or approach, what would it be?”)
* What kind of role do you think I’d really excel in?
* Can you think of anyone in your network who might be good for me to connect with for future openings?
Also, tell her what you got out of the experience and why it was valuable to you. In particular, tell her what a great mentor she was, and why. People don’t say this sort of thing enough — often because they think the person is too important or advanced in their career to care — but people generally love hearing it. Even important and prominent people love hearing it. Say it!
(And not only is it a nice thing to do — which is reason enough — but it will also likely make her more invested in your professional future, or at least more willing to help you if the opportunity arises. People like people who like them.)
Anyone else have suggestions?
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