What makes for an ideal internship?
If you’re a smart, driven college student, that’s a question you should be wrestling with before long. Because not all internships are created equal.
But before you figure out what makes a good internship, you need to ask, why do you want an internship in the first place?
There are probably several reasons. It’s an income source over the summer. It might be an avenue for you to move to a different location temporarily. And more.
But the underlying answer is likely that you want to improve your chances of having a great career and living a great life.
An internship can directly help with this in a few ways. Simply having internships throughout your college experience is a good signal to future employers. It shows future employers that you aren’t simply doing the minimum to get a degree. It indicates you’re willing to do a bit more than that and that you’re eager to apply what you’re learning at school.
But simply having an internship is bare minimum.
If you really are driven to do something meaningful with your life and career, then an internship should be an accelerant for you. It should put you in a position more quickly be able to do meaningful work at an appropriate level.
That might sound trivial, but take a step back and think about how that compounds over time.
Compound interest is the most obvious example. It’s powerful when you realize what decades of compounding can do for your money. The end result is exponential.
Skills can work the same way.
Every step you take to improve your capability, if properly channeled into increasingly more complex and challenging tasks, puts you in a position to take on the next harder problem. And that harder problem creates another opportunity to grow. And so on.
This applies to technical skills, along with so many other domains that you could be exposed to, including communication, emotional intelligence, cross-functional understanding throughout a business, and much more.
So the ability for you to get exposed to and actually contribute to meaningful, complex problems as a high school or college student is drastically better than waiting until you’ve graduated to get that same opportunity.
As such, I’d argue that growth is more important than anything else for an internship. It’s the vehicle that allows you to tap into this compounded learning and development.
Choosing the Best Environment for Growth
But how do you find the right environment to maximize your growth?
This isn’t quite as easy as you might think.
The first heuristic you might be tempted to use is company size or name recognition.
But there are a lot of flaws there. Thinking just in those terms will certainly get you a fancy, recognizable logo on your resume. But it’s rare that those scenarios truly produce high growth environments for interns. There’s simply too much existing infrastructure and systems, too much bureaucracy, and too many people that you risk getting lost in the crowd and thrown into a “catch all” development program.
So maybe you choose to think a layer deeper than that. You listen to what people say.
This is a good step forward.
Not all companies put the same level of intentionality into their internships. Some just do it as a check-the-box activity. Others think they’re giving a gift to any college student who walks through their doors, so they don’t really feel inclined to give a great experience. And others find their own ways to offer subpar intern programs.
But there are also a fair share of companies who want to do things the right way.
They realize that challenging scenarios, with legitimate impact, and the support and coaching to go alongside them, are all critical to provide the type of experience that will truly serve the interns within their program.
When you’re critiquing and assessing an internship opportunity, these are all good things to hear about. It shows that they care and that they are putting thought into it.
Finding a company that truly thinks about and invests in their intern program is important.
But unfortunately words alone aren’t enough either.
Because there’s a big difference between what people say and what they actually do, even when they’re well-intentioned. Hopes and aspirations are rarely accurate predictors of performance and behaviors.
Past behavior and performance are much more useful.
So if you truly want to find an internship with exceptional growth potential, yes, you need to find a place that says the right things. But dig deeper than that.
Look for specific examples of past interns, the types of projects they worked on, the scope of ownership that they were given, the support they received, and ultimately how they developed during their internship.
Let me give a couple examples from last summer, to show what this might feel like.
Example #1: No Prior Manufacturing or Internship
Experience
One of our interns had never set foot on a manufacturing floor, and had never truly worked with power tools. We got to watch him transform over a few months. By the time the summer was over, he had taken ownership of a meaningful problem on the floor, working alongside a couple of teammates to source, build, and install new racking that drastically improved the efficiency and accuracy of our changes.
But that’s not all. He also helped with identification and assessment of new markets for growth. Not just at a superficial level either. He got in the weeds, understood our product and process deeply, and identified places where this might be valuable in new markets.
He also designed, built, failed, redesigned, built, tested, and implemented a new piece of equipment and a new process to improve safety, cleanliness, and effectiveness of one of our processes.
And more.
All with zero experience coming in. Just the right combination of hunger, humility, smarts, and communication skills.
Example #2: Several Years of Prior Experience
Another intern already had experience in manufacturing, and was able to hit the ground running. This past year, she had ownership and responsibility for true, business-critical items. Although she didn’t have much previous exposure to Quality, she was able to help us drive several improvements.
It started with upgrades to our Control Plans, and the underlying Control Plan architecture. Arguably one of the most important pieces of information that help us to identify the actions we need to take to assure we’re producing and shipping good parts.
But she wasn’t just working on paperwork. She also took responsibility for one of the hairiest problems we’ve had on the production floor. It had been nagging us for years, and she was given the opportunity (and support) to dive in head first.
Through that process, she gained a deep understanding of our part, equipment, and process. And was also pushed to abstract that out, so that she now understands product, equipment, and process design, as well as quality control, at a fairly fundamental level.
After weeks of experiments, she even settled on a new gaging method that has helped our business take a meaningful step forward in truly understanding and preventing one of the key causes of our problem.
Even after years of prior internship experience, including in our exact environment, she was able to take a large step forward over this past summer.
Questions to Ask When Evaluating Internships
Those examples should help to show what’s possible. Whether you’re entering with no manufacturing and corporate experience at all, or if you’re coming in with several experiences under the belt, you should expect to walk into an environment that can meet you where you are, push you, support you, and reliably help you reach a drastically different level of understanding, skill, confidence, and contribution by the end of the summer.
As long as you bring hunger, humility, baseline technical capability, and people smarts, the right internship should be a rapid accelerator for your growth. Just like those examples.
To the extent I have advice to offer, I’d urge you to push hard for those specifics. In the interview process, ask companies to show you the evidence.
- What did last year’s interns actually work on?
- What were they responsible for?
- What changes did they make that lasted after they left?
- And maybe most importantly, how were they better when the summer ended, compared to when it started?
If a company can’t produce good answers to those questions, you’re rolling the dice committing a summer with them. And, assuming that you’re truly driven to do great things, this is too important to leave to chance.
But if they can legitimately answer those questions, then pay attention.
Also, if you’re looking for an internship that truly prioritizes your growth, we’re currently looking for exceptional students to join us at PJ Wallbank Springs next summer.
Apply here for our Summer Intern Academy: https://pjwallbankspringsinc.applytojob.com/
And please don’t take my word for what the experience will be.
Ask us to show you.
PS: If you’re a Kettering Student looking for an A or B Section co-op you can apply here:
https://20200102211833_8feviataj9aod619.applytojob.com/apply/IPjzLjdot9/Kettering-Coop-At-PJ-Wallbank-Springs
By: Brandon Bartneck, VP of Engineering and Intern Academy Leader