One of the things I was most excited for as the semesters continued on and I got closer and closer to graduation was getting hands-on experience. An internship blows sitting in a classroom out of the water. If you have the chance to take on an internship in your field, paid or not, I highly recommend it. Do as many as you can handle before you graduate, whether they be formal for college credits or for a few weeks just to add it to your portfolio. You get thrown into real life situations and even if it isn’t so exciting, I promise you’ll learn something valuable.
This past summer I took on my first internship for college credit, therefore I had to complete 128 working hours, submit assignments and watch recorded lessons on internship success. I was lucky to have had this experience sort of fall in my hands. I was debating whether I should pursue working at this company because to be honest, it was for a manufacturer that sells rubber gaskets & O-Rings and that doesn’t sound very exciting. After some debate, it would have been crazy to turn down an opportunity to work with a company that wanted to work with me. My first day was a humid Tuesday in June, I got all dressed up in the only business casual clothes I had in my closet and had my first early morning of my summer. I anticipated that my first day would be filled with loads of paperwork, a lot of monotonous instructions and surface level introductions. Immediately I was proven wrong. There were bright smiles everywhere, people not confined to their cubicles and a President of the company ready with a firm handshake. I spent the morning learning about the history of the company, taking a tour and of course doing some of the necessary paperwork. After that it was lunch, a nerve wracking experience when you’re the newbie and there’s a huge lunch room and no one to eat with. I was promptly taken from my desk when I thought I was eating lunch alone, to instead go out to lunch with my immediate Marketing Supervisor and her boss, the Director of Sales & Marketing for the company. We laughed and got to know each other on the drive and talked about expectations over lunch. I can’t promise every internship is going to be like this but I will say you’ll probably get closer to an experience like this if you take up an internship with a family friend like I did. After lunch, it was time to dive right in. I can wholeheartedly say that each day I worked at this company, I really felt like family and that people wanted me there.
The work I did consisted of tasks like updating spreadsheets, making new sales territory maps, creating announcements to be displayed around the building and interviewing employees for a spotlight appreciation campaign. At times the work was tiring and boring and other times it really felt like I was getting close to finding aspects of a job that I could love and turn into a career. What made this internship enjoyable for me was the people I worked with. There was a balanced relationship between getting work done and taking a moment to value the important things like mental health in the workplace or a little bit of non-work communication to break up the day. I reaped a lot of benefits at this position in such a short amount of time. They held picnics the first Tuesday of each month, hired an ice cream truck to come every day that it was over 80℉ and I was also invited to attend a tradeshow. We traveled to Uncasville, Connecticut for 2 days of manufacturing networking and some free time in one of the coolest hotels I’ve ever been to. While I may not have been passionate about rubber manufacturing parts, the work I was doing had purpose and my role at the company didn’t go unnoticed so it made the experience worthwhile.
Moving forward, looking for my next internship, there are some needs that need to be met. I think the best way to put this is, after you’ve had your first internship experience, look for something completely different to do or a new objective to learn for your next one. While you may love to do the same types of things, just to fulfill your requirement, step out of your comfort zone! You’re more likely to learn what you dislike so you can steer clear of it or you have the chance of finding something that could turn out better than you ever thought it could. All in all, any internship experience you can get when you’re a young college student ready to take on the world, is a good experience.
