Lessons from a Summer Intern

An internship can go one of two ways. You can either leave as the star intern of the office or leave as the dreaded intern who failed to make a lasting impression.
            Luckily, my first internship this past summer as an editorial intern for a magazine publishing company in Pittsburgh went with the former. Really, though, it’s not luck that creates that status, it’s just good old-fashioned hard work.
            It takes time and a lot of learning to build a strong reputation with internship supervisors. Take these four lessons I learned from my summer internship as the surefire secrets to success for an awesome internship experience.
 
1) Be ready and willing for anything.
And I mean anything, including the boring minuscule assignments all interns despise. I started my internship writing short blurbs, updating directories and distributing magazines to local neighborhoods. I yawn just thinking about it, but the great thing about those small assignments is that I got to prove myself to my supervisors. Because they saw the effort I put into the small things, they began to trust me to handle larger assignments. By the end of my internship, I got to write more than seven feature stories, all published in the company’s various magazines. That never would have happened if I hadn’t showed enthusiasm for the mundane work first.
 
2)Make mistakes but learn from them.
Before I began my internship, I was so scared of being the intern who messed up everything in the office. In reality, though, your supervisor isn’t expecting perfection. They understand the internship is a learning process. One of my main duties as an intern was answering phones, directing calls to workers or their voicemail as needed. Figuring out how to transfer calls my first few days was rough. I’m pretty sure I even hung up on a few people by accident. But I worked at it until I got the hang of things, which helped me learn how to be a better intern.     
 
3)Be familiar with everyone at the office.
It takes more than just doing the work to be a great intern. Interns also have to take the time to make their names known. While I was assigned to work mainly with one of the magazine’s editors, I tried to work on assignments for everyone in the office. That way I was able to meet all the major players, from the editorial department to advertising, and show them just how invested I was in the company’s work. By the end of my internship, everyone knew my name and wanted me to come back next summer.
 
4)Ask questions but be independent.
Any internship big or small comes with the possibility of downtime between assignments. The trick is learning how to use that time wisely. I can’t tell you how many times I watched other interns at the office approach their supervisors every hour on the hour for a new assignment. It’s great to show enthusiasm for starting a project, but insanely bugging your supervisor is not the way to go about it. If you have nothing to work on, try researching some cool ideas for a project instead. It will be much more impressive when you pitch an original idea, saving your supervisor from having to come up with something for you to do.