How to Make the Most of Your Internship

By Dr. Nimit Gupta

An internship can be a stepping stone to one's career journey. An internship will often be the first professional work experience of the entire career. Internship is an important pedagogical tool for gaining live corporate experience for interns pursuing their professional courses. Internships are generally carried in companies of repute under the supervision of company mentor. It is an experiential way of learning from peers including subordinates. It is highly skill focused, and based on experience one can gather during this period. Interns who pursue their internship must take this period of learning with high spirit, as this exposure will always be useful during their employability journey. Interns are required to be involved in observations, meetings, research, and administration to gain a clearer insight. To gain maximum benefits from an internship, interns must do the following:

 

Pre-Internship (Before joining internship)

Before joining their internship, interns must spend good amount of time in research and in understanding the nuances of internship, which is often termed as background homework. Interns must:

• Know internship company

Knowing Internship Company is always of use, specially understanding the business model of the company, the products company deals with, geographic presence, major target segment, key officials and important landmarks in the history of company. This helps interns in holistic understanding of company as a whole.

• Know industry/sector

Every company is an integral part of any industry/sector; it is therefore necessary and useful to gain relevant understanding of the company specific industry/sector specially the trends, key players, product variants, industry leader and industry specific regulatory environment.

• Know intern profile

It is highly recommended to have accurate knowledge of the internship profile. Interns must take note of the working domain, including essential and voluntary working area, key expectation of the supervisor, reward system (if any including performance incentives), and most importantly, other roles that are directly or indirectly associated with this profile. 

During internship

Interns during their internship must not act as only a spectator of the events that are happening, (especially in the case of paid internships). During internship they must do the following as per the 4*4 Formula.

• Behavioral action area 
  • Maintain cordial relations with peers of the company
  • Always have an attitude of learning something new and significant
  • Follow timelines and guidelines as shared by the supervisor
  • Never indulge in any office politics with any peer(s)

 

• Domain action area 
  • Critically think and develop reflections of interest
  • Maintain daily log of the activities including work done, observations, problem area(s), solution(s)
  •  Scribble important points of daily log on weekly basis for developing internship report
  • Perform the work as expected and shared by the supervisor
  • Apply your knowledge gained pre internship for performing the allotted work

 

Post -Internship

Interns, after their internship should utilise time in the following activities for gauging their learning experience from the internship:

• Analyse

After internship, interns must analyse the skills he/she gained during the internship period, and must focus on the other skill(s) that need to be built and/or need practice to gain mastery for the profile one had done internship in. This analysis can be self-done or an external opinion can be sought.

• Record

Learning experience gained during the internship must be formally recorded as per the official format (if any) or informally by the intern. Recording is very crucial as it gives better insights of what one had done and gained during the internship period.

• Utilise

Interns should utilise the knowledge gained during the course of their employability journey and must practice it on regular basis to get acquainted to it for life long basis. Utilisation for better career prospects must be the most one can draw from the internship experience.

 

Also read: 6 tips for a successful summer internship

 

Way forward

To make most from the internship, interns must gain substantial hands-on experience along with worthy sense of what an actual job in the organisation would be like. The “Elevator Pitch” is very useful, in which intern must be able to describe holistically the internship experience in two minutes. Therefore interns must take internships seriously and must aim at becoming the “Best Intern”.

 

 

About the author

Dr. Nimit Gupta

(Associate Professor and Area Chair-Marketing, Fortune Institute of International Business, Delhi)

 Dr. Nimit Gupta is a certified marketing trainer, trained by Dr. Philip Kotler. He is also certified in in marketing education from University of British Columbia, Canada and Kyoto University, Japan. He holds 13 years of experience in teaching, academic administration and research. He is an Accredited Management Teacher from AIMA, and is a recipient of several scholastic performance awards.