September 11, 2020
Dear Pre-Internship-Sam,
You don’t know much about your internship yet, but what you do know sounds awesome. You know that you’ll be allowed to eat all the chocolate that you want. You also know you’ll be living in Germany, and I know you’re already planning weekend trips with your co-intern. It will be a lot of fun, and choosing this internship felt like the obvious best choice.
Here’s what I know now, though: after the first month or so of your internship, you will start wondering if the student loans you’ll have to take out for fall semester—since the internship is unpaid—will really be worth it. So many people told you an internship would be important, and they didn’t mention chocolate or travels.
Aren’t internships supposed to be transformative experiences that will help you launch a meaningful career? Someone said something like that at one point. You would otherwise have spent the summer in a boring job, but you would have a paycheck for the fall to show for it.
So, you’ll wonder—why doesn’t your internship feel automatically worth it?
Maybe it’s because, until now, many of your learning experiences have been designed to benefit you. Usually, teachers and professors spend hours creating lesson plans and lectures to help you achieve learning targets. You have always been able to trust that following along with a class syllabus will very likely help you become a more educated human. That’s because that syllabus is designed for you, the student.
No one will hand you, the intern, a syllabus at the chocolate factory.
They won’t even give you specifics for what they expect you to do. And the assignments that they will hand off to you certainly won’t be designed to help you grow as a professional. Honestly, those assignments will just be the things no one else wants to do.
You’ll quickly realize that your supervisor, even though he’s also a BYU grad and he’s really nice, isn’t very concerned with your professional development. He’ll have a thousand things on his plate—he’ll be transitioning the company under the new CEO and trying to help the project management team ramp up productivity and manage stress. There will be other things he’s worrying about that you won’t even know of.
When you go into the chocolate factory that first day and you don’t understand anyone’s German dialect very well, you might expect your supervisor to be like your professor. He’ll probably take you under his wing, right? He’ll make sure that he knows your interests and your strengths so that he can employ you as a professional while you learn the most.
Right?
The reality is that you’ll be at a total loss for what to do for at least about a month, catching him between phone calls to timidly ask, “Is there a project that I can work on?” and, “What can I do to help?” He’ll ask you to talk to Steve, who is supposed to put together a project for you. You’ll follow up with Steve, and he’ll sigh and say he’s working on it.
It makes sense to wonder, “What else am I supposed to do?” You’re showing that you want assignments by asking how you can help! Why aren’t they taking the time to give you something exciting? Or to give you anything at all? They almost seem bothered by your questions.
The news isn’t all bad though, because you already know what you need to make your internship worth it—to make it more than just a summer spent in Europe and a fancy line on your resume. When you’ve sat at that empty desk in the middle of the hallway for long enough, pull out the workbook from the prep course you took and reread your notes. Maybe you don’t remember writing, “Take initiative, come up with your own ideas!” but you’ll thank your past self when you’re feeling frustrated with showing up and having nothing meaningful to do.
Taking initiative might feel strange at first. It will often feel kind of awkward to suggest an assignment for yourself or ask to be involved in a project that interests you.
Sometimes you’ll worry that you’re “just an intern” and think that maybe you should keep your head down and keep carefully constructing samples of chocolate boxes. If you’re really efficient with sticking those contact-paper-printed box designs onto the blank sample boxes and cutting out all of the edges perfectly so that it looks like it’s actually printed on the box, maybe someone will approach you and offer something better—right?
They might, but everyone at the chocolate factory will be so focused on their own projects that they’ll hardly seem to notice how neatly you’ll assemble the samples.
Eventually, it will sink in—no one else will advocate for you. Having a worthwhile internship will hinge on your initiative.
You will want to keep asking questions, but instead of simply asking what you can do, you’ll want to step back and do some observation first. Your “What can I do?” will turn into something like, “I noticed that our Instagram page isn’t very active. Can I go take some pictures of our upcoming chocolates? Who usually posts content?”
Look around you for needs that line up with your interests. If you’ll do that, there will be plenty of opportunities. The project managers will start to appreciate your input. They’ll even ask your opinion when they’re naming a new praline designed for the summer.
When you’re asking questions and making suggestions, pay attention to who can help you as you take initiative. Ask yourself, “Who has a little bit of headspace to listen to your ideas? Who can approve your ideas?” If you will keep taking initiative, the opportunities will keep flowing and you’ll have meaningful work that won’t include making samples of chocolate boxes. Taking initiative will probably always have its awkward moments, but it will be worth it, and it will make your internship worth it.
Remember how your supervisor won’t look after you like your professors and teachers always have?
Here’s the best part—you actually will still have a professor, and a very helpful TA. They might not be there with you once you’re in Germany, but they’ll know what you need to have a worthwhile internship. When you’re struggling with taking initiative, you can email your TA for tips and reread the “Establishing Expectations” module (or any of the other ones, really).
The course might seem like a lot at first, but you will realize that it’s the best guidance you’re going to get on your internship. It’s really great guidance, too. Take initiative and take advantage of the course, and your internship will actually be that transformative experience everyone talks about.
Now, we both know that you will board that plane and dream of travelling and chocolate bingeing. But you now know to be observant and proactive and to take initiative.
You’ve got this!
Older-But-Wiser-Post-Internship-Sam