How to Get the Most Out of Your Internship

I realize that it may be too late for a number of your who have already committed to internships that don't exactly overlap with your long-term goals. For the rest of you, if you don't want to be there, get out. There is nothing more obvious than when somone's heart isn't in something. This is doubly true of the banal tasks that are assigned to interns. You should be paid for all things in life, and though sometimes that payment doesn't come in the form of money, you need to be getting something out of your internship for it to be worth it. If the connections you're making aren't in the field you're looking to get into and the skills you're observing, and hopefully absorbing, don't relate to something you're passionate about, then you should walk. It may seem ridiculous to say this. Why would someone take an internship they don't want? I've seen many budding actresses take internships at a casting agency. I've seen many photographers take internships a PR firms. We're very good at convincing ourselves that just because the internship isn't exactly what we wanted, it's still a good thing because, hey, at least we have an internship. Consider that the time you're spending doing someone else's work for free could be spent improving the skills you actually care about, and that justification sounds pretty silly.

At the first job I had after college I was told by my boss, "If I teach you one thing, let it be how not to fuck up a coffee order." At the time, I thought the guy was an asshole. As time has gone on, I've learned that even if he was an asshole, he was a correct asshole. On the rare occasion that I've had interns and subordinates, I've passed on a modified version of this wisdom. I tell them, "If I can't trust you to get coffee, how am I going to trust you with something that's actually important?" Sure, you can choose to do a crappy job at your crappy job. When you do that, there's nowhere to go but down. If you do a great job at a crappy job, at the very least, you'll be minimizing the number of Starbucks runs you'll have to do in the future.

Whenever you walk into an internship, be vocal about what you want. This doesn't mean jumping in during conferences and adding your two cents. What it does mean is that you need to find a way to get yourself in the room. If the whole point of taking this internship was to see how social media coordinators work, then by all means get in the room where social media is being coordinated and see just how coordinated that social media might be. Then, when the time is right and the people in the room notice that you've been hanging around watching them coordinate social media, tell them that yes, in fact, you want to be a social media coordinator. Boom.

People love to talk about themselves. The mistake that interns often make is that they don't realize that people don't love talking about themselves when there's work to be done. When your superiors are prepping for an important meeting or brainstorming ideas for a new project, that probably isn't the time to ask them how they got their start. When you finally do have some down time, however, start to ask them about how they got started in the business. Odds are they'll drop all sorts of wisdom without a second thought. If you can remember the things they tell you and find ways to apply it to your work, you've set yourself up for success.

Earlier I talked about being the best coffee fetcher you can be. While that's important, it is even better to demonstrate a skill that others in the office lack. Be looking for ways to stand out and take advantage of them when they come your way. This can be something as complicated as speaking a foreign language or as simple as parallel parking. It doesn't matter if this has anything to do with the job; in fact, it probably doesn't since if you do the job better than your bosses, it's time to look for a new internship. The point is that no matter how banal the task may be, you found an opportunity to be useful to the team and took advantage of it. People don't forget that. Even if they just remember you as "the guy who knows how to parallel park," at least they'll remember you.

The people who hear about entry level positions, and in a year or two will be in a position to hire you, are our peers. Out of every class of interns there is a wunderkind who flies up the ranks. Recognize that there is a chance—and it's pretty good—that this high-flier won't be you. When people become managers, they first remember the people that they fought in the trenches with, those that shared long nights in the mail room, and pitchers of beer over bitter complaints. Once the internship ends, be sure to connect with your fellow interns who remain in geographical proximity for happy hours and events. What began as internship hanging out can become a group of tight-knit industry power-brokers in a matter of a decade.

No one is asking you to keep a diary of your internship, unless that works for you. But, you should find some way to reflect on what you've learned. Even if you aren't receiving college credit for the work you're doing, you should act like it. Again, the way you're being paid is with experience. If you don't find ways to digest, analyze, and build on that experience, then you're making poor use of your investment. If you don't know how to go about doing this, then maybe you should start by keeping a journal. At the very least, you'll have all of the funny and juicy details written down just in case your boss goes to prison and you decide to write a tell-all book.

If your boss is too busy to give you the time of day at work, they might be willing to do so during happy hour. If there are after-work drinks going on—and if you work in New York or LA, I can guarantee that there will be—you have to attend. Once your co-workers have a little social lubricant coursing through their veins, you're going to see a totally different side of them. Hitting the bar with your co-workers will likely result in invaluable war stories that distill years of experience in your field into digestible tidbits. Also, you likely won't pay for drinks because you're the intern and people feel bad for you.

When not working as a writer, I work in the film industry, which is one of the most abusive industries around. It is sometimes hard to draw the line between the bitch work necessary of an entry level grunt, and abuse. But make no mistake, that line must exist. Before you head in to intern, it's a good idea to think about what this line is for you. This can be hard. For example, in the film world a fourteen hour day is par for the course for production assistants and overtime isn't compensated. In the freelance writing world, wages are low and unpaid writers are about as common as Internet trolls. Even if you work in a tough business, there are limits. If you feel like you are doing your boss's job for them; if you feel like you are being asked to do work that isn't at all within the scope of the internship you applied for; if you feel that you're the victim of verbal, physical, or sexual abuse, you should quit. That person isn't going to give you a good job, and is likely such an asshole that their contacts are shitty anyway. No matter how niche your field might be, there is certainly someone else who you can go to work for and they will likely treat you better.

Don't expect an internship to pay dividends right away. Generally, internships bear immediate fruit for three types of people: The very good looking, those with relatives in the company, and the lucky. If you don't fall into one of these categories, and there's a good chance that you don't, the worst thing you can do is burn bridges. Don't send out an email passive-aggressively complaining about being looked over. Don't bitch to your colleagues about how much work you did. Take it in stride, check in with them periodically, and leave it alone. After not hearing from a former boss for a few years, I received a job off on his recommendation. En route to that gig, there was a lot of checking in, and a lot of keeping my mouth shut when the phone didn't ring (or, really, when the email didn't make the "you've got a new email" sound.)