YouAlberta
With the academic school year coming to an end, the first day of summer internships and co-op placements is just around the corner. If you have a position lined up, congratulations! If you are still on the search, you have plenty of time and opportunity to land the placement of your desires. Regardless of where you are in the process, here are some things to keep in mind during your placement to get the most out of the experience.
Be intentional and share your “why”
Being intentional is all about going into a placement with a purpose. In other words, this is your “why.” Your answer may be to get a further understanding of how your degree applies to the professional world or get experience to figure out what career paths interest you. Regardless of your reason, it will help you to put forward what you want to get out of the experience. This also goes for how you want to show up and contribute. Do you want to be curious, kind and reliable or ambitious, determined and productive? The second part of this is sharing your intentions with your supervisor and colleagues, so they can keep that in the front of their minds throughout your internship, getting you to where you want to be.
Be self-aware
It’s important to understand where you or your position fits relative to your team and your organization. Having this understanding gives you the opportunity to frame how you can or want to contribute. Staying in scope and practicing is a great way to make a positive impression on your employer.
Actively seek out your goals/opportunities
At the end of the day, a summer internship, especially a co-op placement, is just as much about your learning and development as it is about your output. Get the most out of your experience by setting goals and actively seeking them out through opportunities. This can help you quantify your learning outcomes and add tangible results to your portfolio.
Reflect constantly
Reflection is incredibly important in the process of tracking your growth. If you do nothing else except look down and grind without reflecting on how far you have come or where you are going, you might end up running in a direction where you did not want to end up. Reflecting helps you execute your intentions and goals.
Document your progress
Learning is a process, and it’s important to document this process in order to quantify exactly what it is you did. Documenting your growth could look like something as active as journalling each day or as removed as having a brain dump once a month on what you did or learned. Either way, tailor it to your personality to help you stay consistent. Tracking your growth will give you the experience to share in your future job interviews.
Network
Arguably the most important takeaways from your job placement will be the connections you foster in the process. These connections are your “in” to the industry of your placement. Although they don’t always have to directly lead to job opportunities, they are a means of sharing information and advice to develop you as an individual in the early stages of your professional career.
Be a sponge
In typical sponge fashion, absorb as much information as you can. Your internship is not only about the money you are earning (which happens to be a huge bonus) or the experience you’ll gain; it’s also about the access to the information you’ll have. Access to information and the retention of the information is one of the most applicable skills you’ll be able to take forward with you. This also means being observant. Observe the company culture, leadership decision-making processes, the intuition of your colleagues and more. Absorb as much as you can because, more likely than not, whatever you internalize from experience, you’ll deploy one way or another in the future.
Keep a growth mindset
Go into all experiences you have with a positive and growth mindset. What this looks like practically is always reflecting on the question: what skill am I getting from this task or process? This positive growth mindset will help you foster a positive learning experience that will show you that, even in the smallest tasks, there are takeaways. It also helps to be the positive, upbeat person in the office (they might want you to stick around).
Take professional development and opportunities seriously
Most companies have a budget for professional development or provide opportunities that go outside the scope of the job description. If you have the capacity, take them! It will give you material to add to whatever was in the job description so you can take it forward. It will also show that you are taking the initiative and are actively seeking to improve. This can look like many different things, but to list a few examples, taking courses, attending meetings you weren’t initially invited to, joining on additional projects and requesting informational interviews with people in different departments, etc. These opportunities will open doors and give answers to a curious mind.