The Best Internship I Ever Had

Unlike many previous generations, Generation Yers are lucky enough to get first-hand job experience thanks to internships. This helps in many ways—it allows us to figure out (before we graduate) if a particular field is, in fact, the right one for us, it gives us a chance to get some real-world work experience for our resumes, it teaches us all the things you can’t learn by sitting in a classroom, etc. 

Internships are also a great way for employers to hire the best. 

I had quite a few good internships leading up to my graduation day that helped me figure out what I wanted to do with my life after college, but the best internship I ever had was an internship I completed the summer after I graduated. 

I was living in Upstate New York (where I grew up) and going to school for Journalism and Public Relations. Although I didn’t have an after-graduation plan (the semester before graduation I still didn’t have anything going on—no job prospects, no clear picture of what I wanted to do), I did know that I wanted to work at a magazine.

But getting magazine internships in the publishing capital of the world (also known as the busy city of New York) is extremely competitive, extremely stressful and extremely difficult, even for someone like me who had a lot of “credentials” on my resume, such as being the editor of my campus newspaper and of my campus literary magazine. 

Luckily, I found out about a magazine internship from one of my journalism professors. She gave me the flyer about it and told me I should apply. This internship was not in New York, though, it was across the country in Southern California.

At first I was nervous about leaving my family, friends and boyfriend to move across the country to a place I had never been and where I knew no one, but I figured, at this point in my life, it was worth a shot. So I applied, and amazingly two months later I was one of the three interns hired for the intern positions (which were basically editorial assistant positions at one of the company’s magazines). Then, a month after graduation, I packed five suitcases (a lot, yes, but I can’t live without my shoes!) and flew to my internship in Irvine, Calif. 

On the first day we all met in one of the company’s conference rooms where we were introduced to our internship director and all the people we’d be working with. Then after a tour of the building (and some paperwork because it was a paid internship), we went to lunch to get to know more about our director and the other interns. 

From that day on, we had weekly seminars with different managers in each department that had us learning all about the magazine industry, from how to sell ads to how the magazines get from our computer to the newsstands.

I worked on a reptile magazine (yes, I’m a girl who loves reptiles) and got a chance to sit in on team meetings, edit columns in the magazine and even write a bunch of news pieces and a profile of a turtle species. 

At the end of the internship, they hosted a resume seminar and helped us make our resumes better. Plus, I was hired on full-time as an Editorial Assistant following completion of the program. 

Now this doesn’t sound like anything more than a typical internship experience, but here’s what made it extraordinary for me, and how you can utilize my experience to make your program even better: 

• The Passion—During the seminars each week, we had different managers from each department, such as production, pre-press, imaging, editorial, etc., talk to us about what they do. And during these seminars, the managers who were presenting to us were so passionate about their jobs.
  
  The production manager gave us the history of how paper is made as part of his presentation and he was so excited about it! He loved talking all about paper and the different kinds of paper that they use for the magazines and stuff like that. I couldn’t believe that someone could be that excited about papermaking, but it definitely made me sit up and take notice.
  
  How You Can Use This: Set up weekly seminars for your interns, teaching them all about your industry, including how to do whatever it is you do, from manufacturing a product to helping clients set up their HR department. If you can bring in people to speak during these seminars that are excited and passionate about what they do, you’ll instill the same feelings in your interns.
  
  College students are notorious for fearing the real world because they don’t want to get out there and hate what they went to school for all those years. So if you are able to show them that people at your company really love what they do, you will help them feel more assured that the field/industry they’ve chosen is the right one for them.
  
  
• The Added Bonuses—As I mentioned above, when I was interning for this company, we not only had weekly seminars about the industry, but we also had a seminar at the close of our internship on how to write your resume, and the internship director and editorial director looked at all our resumes and explained how to word things differently and how to write up all the skills we had, etc.
  
  We also had an out-of-office lunch with the company’s president and got to ask him all kinds of questions about the company and industry and anything we were curious about. Also, my magazine team took a field trip one day to visit a venomous snake breeder and see his set up and talk to him about what he does.
  
  How You Can Use This: If you can, set up a lunch with your interns and your company president or CEO and allow them to spend some time getting to know this person and asking questions. Give your interns additional education, such as how to write a resume or how to deal with office gossip or any other business-related topic they might run into someday. Take them on a field trip to meet one of your clients or to see where your products are manufactured.
  
  The reason all these added bonuses made my internship so great was because I felt special and like I was learning something more than I ever could in school. Your interns will benefit from this as well.
   
• The Treatment—As an intern, I was treated like gold. In fact, I even heard that it was harder to get into the company’s internship program than it was to just get hired as an employee, which made me feel really good about my skills.
  
  Prior to moving to California, my internship director contacted me to talk about the program and she gave me a huge list of places to find housing (since I was moving there). She even offered to check some apartments out for me if I needed her to.
  
  During the program, the company catered to my internship group, they took us to lunch, they gave us our own cubes, our own computers, our own supplies…it was nice to know that the company appreciated us as much as we appreciated them. It also made for a very comfortable work environment, and I didn’t even think twice when they offered me a full-time position at the end of my internship.
  
  How You Can Use This: Show your interns that you care about them. You don’t have to take them to extravagant places for lunch or give them brand new laptops, but doing small things for them, like giving them their own cube, could do wonders for your company and your program. 

Remember, former interns are a company’s best advertisement for future interns. I had such a good experience that I went back and told my college professor to tell more of her students to apply for the program, and the next fall someone else from my college did. 

If you train your interns and treat them right, when you offer them an open position they’ll be more than willing to say yes and you’ll be able to hire someone who has the skills you need.

Unlike many previous generations, Generation Yers are lucky enough to get first-hand job experience thanks to internships.