How To Succeed As An Intern

5 Ways I Found Success as an Intern and How You Can Too

College is expensive, as a recent graduate with my BFA, I have fully come to terms with the exorbita n t amount of money I pay every month toward my student loans. That being said, you would think that as a student, I would have spent as much time in and around campus as possible, taking every class available to make sure I got my money's worth right? Well, that's one approach but it isn't the only way to get the most out of your time in school. During college, my only real goal was to make sure I had gotten some real working experience before graduating and I made that my top priority. Two internships and a year-long Co-Op later, I graduated and now I want to share some of what I learned from my experiences with the hopes that you may find success in your own ventures before heading out into the post-college world.

With all of that out of the way, let's talk about why you should even try and get an internship while you are still in school, can't you just learn those things when you get your first job like everyone else? Well, just like college is the place to explore and find what you are passionate about, internships are your opportunity to figure out where those passions live in the workplace. They're ideal because they're almost always a fixed amount of time, usually 3–4 months, and that's usually just long enough to find out if the experience you just had worked for you or not. On one hand, your three months are up and you finally feel like you have a grasp of what you're doing and how you fit in and you wish it wasn't over. On the other hand, by the time your three months are up you've realized that the experience wasn't for you and you can happily move on, hopefully with the knowledge of how to avoid similar experiences in the future. The main goal of spending time in the workplace in college is to find what works for you , and that usually takes a few tries. Utilizing internships while you are in school could end up being one of the most valuable learning experiences you have before graduating. That being said, here are 5 things you can do to find success in your internship experiences.

1. Ask Questions & Challenge Others

As an intern, you might not always be filled in with all of the details of a job or project. Your contribution will most likely be a much smaller part of the greater whole. What I mean by challenging others is to simply ask why. Ask them to explain the broader process or initiative. Doing so will give you the most insight on how you can accomplish the task to the best of your ability. Figuring out the significance of what you're doing is the fastest and easiest way to better understand your own job and what is being asked of you. Often times, the people who have the knowledge of the process that you're (sometimes unknowingly) looking for, have subconsciously ingrained it into their own workflow. At that point, it can be easy to forget to pass that knowledge on to the less experienced team members. Asking simple questions about what you're supposed to be doing not only has the potential to clear up any possible confusion you might have, which could result in wasted time and effort, but it also shows that you care about what you're doing and aren't just another intern who's only there to (hopefully) collect a paycheck and leave. It's usually the ones who show ambition and drive that prove to be the most valuable assets to a company and ultimately can help push the business further in the long run.

Challenging others also means that if you have an idea for a better way to solve the problem, speak up! Don't just sit back and let all of the experienced people play. Yes, they have more experience and as a result, their ideas might turn out better than yours — but not always. Shoot your shot! As an intern, the risk is lower if your idea doesn't work out.

Nobody is going to expect you to have the best idea at the table (or any at all), but if you keep all of your ideas to yourself, you'll never have the chance to realize that your idea could have been the best at the table.

Surprise the people around you with creative solutions and bright ideas. The hardest part of having a good idea as an intern is finding the courage to share it. In the end, if your idea doesn't work out, then take some time to figure out why and learn from it (more on embracing failure later).

Challenging people can be risky though if you don't approach it with the right intentions. You don't want to come off as if you think you have all of the answers or as a problematic or difficult person to work with. Always approach the situation with a reminder that your goal is to learn and that by asking questions and being ambitious, you are trying to achieve that goal.

2. Find a Mentor (or many)

By far, the most effective way to gain a better understanding of what you're supposed to be doing (and ultimately be successful at it) is to find a mentor. In my experience, any great internship program will pair you with an experienced employee who is capable of taking on their workload as well as overseeing the work you do too. If this is the case great, but nobody ever said you could only have one mentor, have as many as possible!

If you don't start out with a mentor, go out and talk to some of the people you will be working alongside and just start by asking them questions. Ask for advice or help when you have a problem and eventually try and build a working relationship with that person.

You don't even have to let them know that you've chosen them to be your mentor, just try and find someone that can answer your questions and give you occasional wisdom or insight about your industry.

For example, at one of my internships I was in a mid-project review and one of the designers on my team went up to pitch his concept for the project. He presented his ideas passionately and persuasively, providing logical rationale for every step of his process. This experience made it very clear that I wasn't as good as I could be at presenting my work — or at least presenting it effectively. After that meeting, I decided to reach out to him and get his advice on how I could become better at presenting my own ideas and ended up getting a lot of great advice. Surround yourself with people who are better than you and if you take the time to learn from them, you'll consistently get better as a result. It's important to analyze areas you want to be better at and try to find people who are good at them. They are the experts you should seek out and learn from — these are your mentors.

The differences in experience between an internship where I didn't have a mentor and the ones where I did were astounding. I came out feeling much more prepared and full of insights at the end of the internships where I had mentors than the ones where I didn't. All in all, taking the time to make sure you have a solid mentor will result in an invaluable resource that you can utilize throughout your internship and potentially even in the future.

3. Learn From Everyone

Just like I believe you should try and find as many mentors as you can in an internship, you should aim to meet and work with as many other people around the office as well. Some of the most valuable learning opportunities in an internship, aside from the first-hand experiences you will gain, are through the experiences that your other team members have had in their own careers. Every person has their own unique perspective and they all have faced their own challenges to get where they are. You can always learn from others experiences even if you didn't experience it first-hand yourself. They were all in your shoes once and many of them probably went through some of the same challenges that you will go through as you progress in your career. Ask them what worked for them when it came to finding a job and how they overcame some of the difficulties they faced getting to where they are. Take note of the way they work and figure out what makes them successful in their day-to-day.

Picking up on little habits here and there can save you a lot of time and energy when it comes to figuring out a workflow that works for you, among other challenges you will eventually navigate. If you're at a bigger company with multiple teams then try and find the opportunity to at least talk to, if not work with, as many people as you can. Sometimes, by listening to and learning from another person's experiences, you can better prepare yourself if you end up facing similar obstacles on your own journey.

4. Embrace Failure and Learn From It

The time when you are still in college and especially at an internship, is the perfect time to make mistakes. As an intern, not much is really expected of you other than trying your best and actively learning. Try new things because if they don't work out, you can always try something new. If you were a full-time employee at the company, then the consequences of failure would be a bit higher. You risk costing the company time and money by failing as a full-time employee — these concerns don't usually apply to an intern. If you're going to mess up, there's no better time than when you are essentially expected to. With that, treat every failure as a learning opportunity.

Failing will suck, but if you can learn from it then you will grow and be more successful than had you not taken the time to learn from your failures at all.

At my first ever internship as a designer, I worked at a local magazine company where I had the chance to design the promotional campaign for a local event that was coming up. The ads were going to be in a lot of places all over town but I was most excited about my work getting its own full-page ad in the magazine. The magazine went off to the printer and all that was left to do was wait. Some weeks go by, and I come into work and my boss lets me know that the print run with my ad in it had come in and was sitting on the dock. To say I was excited is an understatement. I got to see my work printed in the magazine and at the end of the day, snagged one for myself. Fast forward a few weeks and I'm showing off my work in the magazine to a family member when they so kindly pointed out that in a central part of my design, there was a typo — my stomach sank . The realization that I had let a typo find it's way into thousands of magazines that were all over the city sucked pretty bad. The next day I went in, I knew I had to do the one thing that scared me most at the time — admit my failure and tell my boss what happened. I had contemplated not even saying something, it was too late, right? To my surprise, he wasn't that upset and actually seemed kind of relieved. It turned out that they were just getting ready to send the same ad out to print in the next month's issue and that if I was quick, I could fix it before it went to print again. I was able to correct the design and all was well in the end. I learned a lot from that experience and now I always triple check spelling or better, work with an editor. But the biggest lesson I learned was that through admitting (sometimes painfully) and learning from my mistakes, I could turn failures into successes.

5. Lead Now Not Later

One of the first pieces of career-relevant advice I was ever given was back in high school when I first learned how to design, and what a graphic designer did. I knew I wanted to do graphic design but felt like where I was, I wasn't good enough to call myself a designer yet. That first piece of advice was to not hold myself back and wait until I felt like I was good enough, to call myself a designer. As long as I was designing, no matter where I was in the progression of my craft, I was a designer. This ultimately gave me some much-needed confidence and kept me from holding myself back based on insecurities.

The same concept applies to leadership. Being a young designer, I assumed that I wouldn't get the opportunity to lead until I was much further in my career. I assumed that I would have to wait until I was in a leadership position to lead.

The reality is, you don't have to wait to lead — and you shouldn't. Being a leader is all about creating opportunity for the people around you.

Being a positive influence and actively working towards your own goals as well as doing what you can to help others achieve their goals is just one way you can be a leader. Remember, you don't have to wait for anyone to give you permission to lead, adopt a leadership mentality, and you will find you are much more successful in your endeavors.

One thing to keep in mind, however, is many people aren't used to less experienced people just getting started in their careers, being leaders. You will have to seek out opportunities for yourself to become a better leader but if you can, it will be worth it. It will be easy for those of you who are still in school doing internships or recently out of school beginning to work full-time, to get stuck in the cycle of busy-ness. It makes sense, all of a sudden you are surrounded by people with so much more experience than you and there's so much to learn in such a seemingly short amount of time. It can be easy to get caught up in that and forget to look for ways that you can grow as a leader. Unfortunately, we don't normally get taught how to lead as an intern or even as a recent grad but you should strive for the opportunity to lead nonetheless. In the long run, your skillset won't be limited to the current software or technology, you won't have to rely on playing catch up with every new update or tool that comes out. Your ability to lead will push you beyond those constraints. For now, just focus on finding ways you can lead in any way you can.