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Internships

Maximizing Your Summer Internship

Stepping into an internship programme can seem like a nerve-wrecking challenge. But you should be excited about the opportunity to gain new knowledge, acquire great skills, and meet incredible people.

The following article will help to maximize your internship before the program starts.

1. Before the Internship

Evaluate Commitments

Firstly, do your best to evaluate your summer commitments so that you can focus on your summer internship. Personally, I’ve interned at a small company while being enrolled into a summer college course. Although balancing the two was challenging, I was able to successfully tend to both responsibilities by communicating with my manager who understood the situation. Some other commitments could be family or friend related, maybe you usually work a part-time job, or are in a summer school.

Research Content

If you are working in deal consulting, research a few recent mergers & acquisitions or IPOs that have gone big. If you are working at a bank, understand how your part of the bank will work (retail, consumer, wealth management, investment etc.). You can get here in a number of ways:

  • Watching Youtube videos that explain difficult concepts in easy-to-understand ways
  • Searching Google for relevant business articles about your business and industry
  • Signing up for business newsletters such as Morning Brew or The New York Times to stay up to date with the latest business news

Nobody is expecting you to be an expert before the internships, but a little research will help you get off the ground faster. During this research, formulate a few questions in the back of your mind about the industry you are about to enter. This will give you a greater sense of purpose during your internship as you can spend your 10-weeks trying to answer them.

Research Team Members

Organizations are all about the people working in them. An incredible aspect of interning at an organization is being team members with accomplished business leaders. Take some time to LinkedIn search the team-members you will be working with. You might have questions about their professional careers, previous challenges they have worked on, and what problems they are currently trying to solve. Try Google searching business leaders who may have been interviewed in articles or podcasts explaining their work. Leverage these insights to have even deeper conversations when the time comes.

2. During the Internship

Focus on Your Responsibilities

Your internship program may connect you to learning events, and meetings with peers and leaders. It is easy to get distracted, so it is important to remember the core tasks and responsibilities you have.  This advice may sound obvious, but it deserves to be said.

Go The Extra Step

After you have managed your core responsibilities, connect with your manager to go the extra step. There may be interesting projects or challenges that they could use extra help with.

The important thing to remember here is to not commit to engagements that you do not have the bandwidth for. It is not impressive to do more work at lower quality just for the sake of saying “you did more”.

Connect with Peers

The organization you are working with has done the work of putting like-minded students in the same internship program. In some way, you all share similar interests and skills but come from different academic backgrounds, parts of the world, and perspectives. Use the internship to connect with peers and develop new professional connections and friendships.

3. Concluding the Internship

Reflect on the Engagement

Connect with your manager for an end of internship performance review. If your manager does not have one scheduled, request a feedback session asking for positive and constructive feedback based on your performance. This is a great opportunity to reflect on what went well but also areas for improvement in your professional career.

Share Your Appreciation

Towards the end of the internship program, be sure to send thank you emails to those that had a significant impact on your experience. This could be your manager, senior leadership, and team members. Send LinkedIn connections to stay professionally connected.

You now have plenty of tangible ways to maximize your internship. Be sure to get ahead by preparing beforehand, staying diligent during, and ending the program on a strong note. All the best during your summer internship!

Zuhair Imaduddin is a labor relations student at Cornell University. He was a Product Management Intern at PNC Bank and is an incoming Innovation Development Summer Analyst at JPMorgan Chase.

Image: Unsplash

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