Summer Internships - A Reflection

When you are a junior in the Kelley School, you are strongly encouraged to find a summer internship position between your junior and senior years. In fact, you may even feel pressured to do so. Not only does it look good on your resume to have work experience, but many of your peers (future job-market competitors) will have completed summer internships. During Honors I-Core, which I took fall semester 2008, a required class was Professional Development. That class geared every junior Kelley Business Honors student for internship interviews through resume prep, mock interviews, cover letter writing, and other career building exercises. It was also a scare-tactic to inform us how competitive the job market was last fall - even for paid and unpaid interns.

During the past two summers, I have been lucky to secure a marketing internship at the environmental consulting/web-services firm Earth Knowledge. This past summer I completed an eleven-week marketing experience. During this time, I devoted my efforts to researching and implementing a social media marketing campaign for the company. In order to produce a social media action plan for the company, I attended numerous webinars, read several books, researched social media news/trends, participated in media agency meetings, experimented with various platforms, and created informed recommendations. Out of seven social media recommendations for the firm, I was able to assist with the implementation of the first four - which was very exciting for me. Overall, I feel confident that the knowledge I gained this past summer will carry over to success within my marketing classes during my senior year as well as my future professional career.

Now that I feel I have learned a lot of up-to-date marketing knowledge, I cannot stress the importance of finding an internship that caters to the knowledge base you should create for your post-undergrad career. I know it was very difficult for many juniors this year to obtain an internship due to the struggling economy, but I hope my positive undertaking can help motivate interested students to actively search for any beneficial work experience they can find (regardless of whether it is for their dream employer or not). I have been in interviews with prominent companies where the interviewer has asked me all about what I learned through interning at Earth Knowledge, even though the interviewer had never heard of the company. I truly think that it pays to have experience to talk about...especially to use as examples for commonly asked interview questions.

A blog I enjoyed reading during my internship this summer was written by the faculty at the UCSO, which is the undergraduate career center at Kelley. It gives some great tips for how to be an outstanding intern: http://kelleyinterns.wordpress.com/