The Intern Overview: Part 2
I’m diving into week two now with five days worth of experience completed. The first couple of days my co-workers helped ease my transition into working in an office, allocating smaller scale responsibilities, but with a huge conference quickly approaching, the preparation work necessary to attend seemed to pile up on my co-workers. Then of course there was the usual daily work that needed to be completed too. As the intern, I wanted my co-workers to know that I was there to be the staple to their piles of paper. This is where I see a need for my job as an intern, an extra pair of hands to assist in completing projects to reduce working late and the stress associated with deadlines. My question to full-time employees of any company, firm, or agency, is what do you expect of us, the interns?
I guess all interning experiences are different of course depending on your purpose as an intern and the type of office or field of work you are operating in. After talking with my friends from college about how their internships are going, I’ve begun to question if I as an intern am expecting too much with respect to what my role is in the office. Each friend I’ve talked with has had a different experience so far. One friend interning at a radio station has been asked to do more work than she expected to receive. On the other hand, I had a friend who worked in the business end of hotel concierge management and was only trusted to answer the phone for eight hours a day.
I believe it’s universally known among student interns that any company or office would be skeptical about giving full time work to an intern with little to no experience. But all of us are looking to understand the work so that in the future, we can be trained to do it as a full-time employee would. When I am questioned about why I want to be an intern, my answer is simple, because I want to be exposed to as much of the field as possible and to understand the functionalities of it.
I guess it really depends on who you’re working for as the employee. Personally, I view lawyers to always have strict deadlines and hectic offices. I could understand how someone in an office like that would be conflicted with trusting an inexperienced person with any information about a specific case. Employers, know that we understand your fears! To give a little more insight to those workers from personal experience so far, guide your intern through the process of how to complete tasks that would normally be work for another, experienced employee.
Over the past five days I have been trained by multiple marketing team members to work in different areas such as sales, email statistics, graphic design, and blogging. And yes, I’ll be the first to say that I’ve had to ask multiple questions and have made mistakes. My co-workers have been understanding of this and understand that it’s a learning process. But in time, after working on many of these tasks for different areas within the marketing department, I hope they will be able to rely on me to do tasks they do, interchangeably.
I still don’t know the answer to what employees expect of an intern, but most of us interns are trying to exceed those expectations every day.
