What Makes a Good Internship?

It’s internship season!

As classes have wrapped up at the “semester schools,” and are quickly drawing to a close for those of us at the “quarter schools,” many of our students are preparing to embark on a variety of internships.

If you’re in this group (or you are supervising an intern this summer), here are some tips for making it a good one. I asked this questions of my Twitter peeps, and I’m including some of their insights here, too.

Communicate with your supervisor what your goals and expectations are for the internship.

Working together with your internship supervisor to chart a clear path for your internship period will benefit both of you. You’ll have an opportunity share your ideas about particular tasks, clients, events or campaigns you’d like to be part of and the team you’re working with work with you to meet those objectives.

Treat your internship as one big interview.

Whether you want to be hired at the end of your internship or not, it’s important to use the time to act as a professional and demonstrate your drive, abilities and potential. You want to be able to use the experience to launch your career!

Internships should provide practical experience.

We know that PR people sometimes make copies, and get coffee for themselves colleagues, interns should do that no more than anyone else in the office. The work should resemble that of entry-level professionals and clerical and administrative duties should be at a minimum. (this was an important theme among the peeps)

If you’re not sure, ask a faculty member, or a mentor for advice about a particular opportunity. For more a great student perspective, check out Alisha Levin’s post on PROpenMic.

What do you think? Whether a supervisor or student… what makes a good internship?