As many of you gear up for fantastic summer internships, take this key piece of advice to heart. Your fellow interns will not be your competition; they will be your saviors! Sure, maybe you are all striving to get the same dream job in the end. But pulling some Blair Waldorf takedown moves are going to make your summer a very long and tedious one for quite a few reasons.
Take the time to get to know each other
First and foremost, you’re going to need friends. Things can get a bit lonely for a little intern in a big office, and chances are most employees won’t pay much attention to you. They do have endless responsibilities in their big jobs, after all. Take the time to get to know the women you are working with in the intern office. These are the people who are headed in the same direction as you, and you never know how they could help you in the future.
Sit down, have lunch with them and find out a little about where they came from. Bonding with someone who’s in the exact same situation as you will be a huge stress reliever. This is especially helpful if you’re headed to NYC or an unfamiliar place. It can be hard to meet people in a city, so it’ll be nice to have someone you can call up to see a movie with on a Sunday afternoon.
Learn from each other
Next tip: your fellow interns can be your resource for unanswered questions. In an internship, you’re expected to know how to do things and do them well. What if someone asks you to do a seemingly impossible task? Find out how to accomplish it, quickly. Google it, experiment, whatever, but the last thing your editor or supervisor has time for is showing you step by step.
Here’s where your intern friends come into play again. Many times you might be a little clueless on the details of a task. Maybe your fellow intern had to perform the same job last week or has more experience with it. Ask her first. She can give you a few guidelines to execute the task flawlessly, and kudos to you for being independent and not pestering your editor.
Keep in touch
Finally, be sure to stay in touch with your internship summer gal pals. You never know where you will all end up in the future. In five years, it could be your fellow intern who helps you land that big job. Be friendly, outgoing and hardworking to make the best of your internship, and be sure to catch up with your intern gal pals every once and a while.
How other Mizzou collegiettes™ relied on their fellow interns:
“There was only one other beauty intern, and we worked on different days, so we never actually met one another. But we would leave funny little notes to each other about what we had accomplished or what still needed to be done. Given a different experience with more contact with my fellow beauty intern, I think it would have been very important to work as a team. I guess I did do that in some form with leaving our notes, but it would have been nice to have company because there was a lot of downtime some days.” –senior Emmy Hayes, Seventeen intern
“It was nice to have somebody to lean on and split the work with because for the first two weeks, I was by myself, and it was quite stressful. I still talk to one of them occasionally since we’re so close to graduating and having to find jobs. I never felt as if we were competing against one another, and I don’t think that girls should go into an internship thinking they can’t be friends with their fellow interns.” -senior Jessica Davis, Redbook intern
“We were both commodity merchandising interns, but her location was completely different compared to mine. This difference was due largely to the size of the location. We were able to ask questions to each other and keep each other updated on what we were doing on a daily basis and how much we were learning.” -senior Erin Keiser, ADM intern