Rules of the Road for Your Summer Internship
Senior executive and company founder, Laura Gassner Otting was riding in an Uber in NYC and just wrote up this list in about ten minutes of “what I wish my summer intern knew on his/her first day…”
Below you will find her sage advice:
- Be on time. Every day, to everything. No matter how important you think your time is, it’s less important than the person waiting on you. Seriously, experiment with your chosen transportation a few days before to make sure you know how long it will take.
- Do what you say, say what you do. Don’t be false or unreliable. You have no track record, so your word is your value. Don’t diminish it before it can accrue value.
- Do your homework on the organization, on the staff, on the competition, and on the address of the office and your transportation options (see #1).
- Overdress for the first day. You can always dress down on subsequent days. But never dress down so much that your higher-ups can’t just bring you along to an event at the spur of the moment.
- Squeeze in time to get to know people. Follow them to the elevator, go out of your way and walk them to their bus stop, give blood next to them (seriously, I got my first real job this way), whatever it takes as long as you aren’t clingy, to make sure that your development is done in their found moments.
- Be grateful. There a handful of mentees who consistently write me thank you emails — and even fewer who hand write and mail notes — and I will go out of my way to include them in anything I think might be of interest or create opportunity for them. It takes fifteen seconds, and creates a lifetime of good impressions.
- Make it easy. If there are issues that you care about, want to learn about, want exposure to, and you see peers or higher-ups active or attending related events, go talk to them and ask if you can ever tag along. They’ll likely say yes. And if they say no, they’ll likely look for some other way to help. The one thing they won’t do is sprout ESP and know that you are interested unless you say something.
- Listen more than you talk. The internship is not your chance to impress everyone by showing off how much you know; it’s your chance to impress everyone by learning everything you can.
- Ask for help. Don’t feel like you have to know how to do everything. Everyone was new once. Showing your vulnerability is better than making stupid mistakes.
- Eat the world. Go to networking events, go to speaker series lunches, go to happy hour with co-workers, attend a ball game, fall asleep at the opera. Get your work done, but take this summer when you have no other obligations — trust me, mortgages, children, aging parents, death and taxes — and eat the world for breakfast.