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For students, life has two seasons: the summer and the school year. When the fall semester kicks into high gear, summer activities are soon forgotten as students focus on the coming academic year's challenges. Like a summer romance, summer internships become ancient history when this annual rite of passage takes place. But looking at your internship as just that thing you did last summer is a big mistake.
Summer internships -- and internships during the school year, for that matter -- are your career's building blocks. If you look at them as isolated episodes in your undergraduate or graduate school experience, then you're missing the boat. Instead, you need to keep your internship experience current -- both in your mind and on your resume. Using the post-internship checklist below is one way to do this.
Post-Internship Checklist
Take stock of what you learned about your career options during this internship.
- Would you like to do the sort of job that the internship simulated?
- If your duties as an intern were mundane and dull, do you think you would like to do the job you observed your supervisor or someone else doing?
- Do you think you want to be in that industry or field at all?
- How did you like the work environment (i.e., the type of organization you worked for, the location and atmosphere of the work site)?
- Is this a career option to consider or rule out?
Take stock of what you learned about yourself during this internship.
- Did you learn anything about your work-related skills and abilities?
- Did you learn anything about what does or doesn't interest you?
- What did you learn about your personality as you dealt with coworkers and supervisors, or with clients and customers, if applicable?
Update your resume.
- Write down everything you did during your internship, all your duties and responsibilities. Don't worry about whether they were trivial or impressive; just jot them all down. Also, make note of job functions or areas of expertise you were exposed to through your observations, even if you didn't do those things yourself.
- Reread any descriptions of your internship from when you first heard about it. If that's not available or is not accurate, then speak with your internship supervisor or other interns for suggestions on how to describe the experience.
- Meet with a counselor in your campus career office or attend a resume-writing workshop (if any are offered at your school) for help in updating your resume with this recent internship or for help in starting a resume if you don't already have one.
Request letters of recommendation and send thank-you notes.
- As soon as possible after the internship, write to your primary internship supervisor as well as to anyone at the internship site who worked closely with you or who was particularly supportive. Thank them for helping to make your internship experience a valuable one and tell them what you learned or let them know how the internship helped you in your career development. Even if you hated the experience and have no intention of pursuing that field as a career, you still need to write at least a brief, polite thank-you note.
- You might also write to any key, top-level people in the organization with whom you may have interacted briefly, even if you didn't work closely with them. They could be valuable contacts in the future.
- In your thank-you note, or in a separate follow-up note or phone call a week or two later, request a letter of recommendation. Make the process easy for the writer by giving a list of points they might include in the letter, such as your basic job duties, what you learned and how you excelled. The reflecting you have done in the first three steps of this checklist will help prepare you for requesting these.
Build on the experience.
- If you enjoyed the internship and think you might want to pursue that field as a career, look for ways to continue gaining experience in that area. Set up networking meetings with alumni in that field; ask professors or campus career counselors about joining the relevant professional association as a student; keep in touch with the people with whom you worked at the internship site; and start searching and/or applying for another internship or part-time job in that field for the current school year, the upcoming winter or spring break or the following summer.
- If you didn't like the internship setting, or the job duties or the field or industry as a whole, meet with a career counselor on campus to discuss alternative areas in that field or some completely different career options you might try out in your next internship.
As you go through this checklist, don't just keep all your thoughts in your head. Put your evaluation down on paper and set up a file to keep track of your ongoing career planning. Reflecting on your internship experience while it's fresh in your mind and requesting recommendations while you are fresh in the internship sponsor's mind will save you a lot of time and trouble down the road.
