Increasingly, internships are essential for success
By Penelope Trunk, Globe Correspondent, 10/30/05
The sun shines on Tatiana Pereira. Unlike most college seniors, Pereira, 21, is decompressing at a Boston café after a day of work as an intern at an ad agency. She has been so meticulous about building her résumé during the past three years at Babson College that she decided three summers of interning in the fashion industry were not enough — she needed the ad-agency internship this fall, she says, ''to get experience in another industry because it is so hard to get a job. And the more experience you have, the better.''
Most students won't graduate with as many internships under their belt as Pereira, but 82 percent of graduating seniors will have completed at least one, according to Mark Oldman, co-founder of Vault Inc. a publisher of career resource information.
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''In the United States, an internship is no longer an optional benefit but an essential stepping stone for career success,'' Oldman says.
The time to start looking for a summer internship is now. Some industries, such as finance, and journalism, typically have deadlines in the fall. Others have spring deadlines. The bottom line is, the earlier you start, the better your experience will be.
''Internships are a really important part of career exploration, so you should start as early as possible,'' says Barbara Peoples, associate director in the Career Development Center at Brown University, which holds meetings in November to get students started on the summer internship process.
It's very hard to tell which sort of job you'll be happy in, and Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University, says working summers in a few different industries is a good way figure it out.
''Don't ask people, 'Does your career make you happy?' because most people will say yes,'' he says. ''Instead, observe people in their work to see if you think they look happy.''
And before those of you who are way past college stop reading this, Oldman points out that the benefits of an internship aren't limited to college students. ''Increasingly, recent college grads and even career changers of all ages are doing internships,'' he says. ''They are a great way to ignite career interest. But they are also a low risk way to sample a new industry without committing yourself.''
No matter what age you are, you should follow the same advice for evaluating opportunities. Here is the list of characteristics that make for a good internship, according to Oldman:
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Substantive work
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Mentoring opportunities
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Some sort of pay
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Chance to gain permanent employment
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Good quality of life
So, how do you get one of these plum internships? The best resource for college students is the campus career center. One of the most important aspects of succeeding in a career is learning to ask for help, so get started now at the career center, when the stakes are not so high, and there is a vested interest in helping you succeed. Pereira went another route: Networking. She landed her first two summer internships through family friends.
But there is just so far one's network can go. Pereira did not have connections in advertising, so she applied online, which is an option for many internship programs. ''It's pretty competitive,'' she says. ''So apply to as many places as you can so that you have a lot of options.''
It might seem that you cannot go wrong in the internship department, but it is not without controversy. Many internships are unpaid — toeing the line of labor laws and sometimes even crossing it. And some internships pay, but not nearly as well as, say, a summer job in construction, or corralling 10-year-olds at overnight camp. For people who do not have funding from their parents or a nest egg of their own, subsidizing an unpaid internship is often out of the question.
But Peoples says that even if you are not doing unpaid labor in the field of your dreams, you can benefit from your summer work. You should ''know what you are seeking from a summer experience,'' she says. ''Even if you are working at a summer camp, think about goals like becoming a supervisor or working in a different area.'' Peoples adds that everyone should have learning goals.
And in fact, the process of crafting goals for personal growth on the job might be the most important internship lesson of them all.
Penelope Trunk can be reached at penelope@penelopetrunk.com
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