Taking Control of the Internship Experience

This is a guest blog by Molly Zweig. She is an Indiana University student majoring in International Studies and Spanish and minoring in Marketing and Portuguese. She plans to graduate in 2015.  This summer, she is the Marketing Intern at the WonderLab Museum of Science, Health and Technology in Bloomington. She works to promote WonderLab in many ways through traditional communications and marketing and social media.

One of the biggest challenges interns face is determining what exactly we’ll be doing at our internships.  You get a job description, but it’s hard to know until the end of the first week on the job if you’ll be truly contributing to the company or if you’ll be making copies and coffee.  However, whatever kind of internship you have, you always have control over your experience.

I am truly grateful for the wonderful work environment and my supervisor at the WonderLab Museum of Science, Health and Technology in Bloomington, Indiana.  In any new workplace, it helps to have someone looking out for you.  In my case, it’s WonderLab’s Marketing Director Louise Schlesinger.  I knew from my interview that Louise was going to be a great supervisor because she talked with me about my internship being a mentoring process.  I have learned so much more about marketing, communications, and paying attention to small details from Louise.  She is my advocate in so many ways—she lets me know when there are only two cupcakes left in the break room, teaches me how to write press releases and ads for radio, and clearly explains how everything works.  I know that Louise truly has my interests and abilities at heart and wants me to succeed and WonderLab and wherever my plans take me.

Another important way to help yourself at your internship is to ask for help—everyone wants you to succeed so the organization also succeeds.  When you’re assigned a task and you lack the capability to do it, let your supervisor know.  She can help you learn what you need to be able to complete it, or modify the task in some way.  For example, I was asked to design a small flier for an upcoming event. I have limited design skills, and the easiest way to make the flier was to use Adobe Creative Suite.  I do not know how to use this program and haven’t even been able to successfully download it on my computer.  I decided to use Word, and the entire project ended up taking a long time, and my supervisor and I ended up having to re-do the project. If I had stated up front that this task was sadly beyond my technical capability or asked for help, everyone could have been much better off.

The most important thing about enhancing your internship experience is seeking out the stuff you actually want to do—if your internship mainly consists of the cliché coffee and copies tasks, there is a way out!  Ask to be involved with something that is important to you.  Everyone at the office knows you got an internship because you wanted to learn skills.  Obviously, you cannot walk into a new workplace and be the CEO, but once you understand how things work at the bottom, it’s okay to ask for more higher up tasks.  To focus yourself, understand what you want to get out of your internship experience and find ways to help achieve those goals.

As my summer internship experience comes to a close, I am very happy to have had such a great experience.  I learned valuable skills about marketing and communication, and, almost as importantly, I learned skills to take control to make any job experience I have better.