<p>I have a question regarding students and working. My daughter has a friend who did an internship this summer. He thought things went well but got “weird vibes” at the end of the internship. (Not invited to a party at the end of the summer). But I heard through a friend it went as badly as it could go. He had no exit interview and no idea why they thought badly of him. My daughter said they owed him the truth of the experience. She said, “we’re 19 years old. We still need direction and help from adults. Isn’t that what an internship suppose to be?” If it was going badly why didnt they intervene and try to redirect him? Do students get good feedback from their internships? What do you do when an internship goes bad?</p>
<p>Interns definitely need guidance and feedback. I had a summer internship last year that went great. I’ll go into my situation last summer…started off not liking it because it seemed like nobody wanted to help me. Finally ended up with a supervisor that was easy to get along with and willing to help. I only saw him 2 days / week (I worked at company hq, he worked at field office 3 hours away), but he was only a phone call away and always willing to answer questions. Made my experience much more enjoyable.</p>
<p>Now the other intern I worked with, I know he was not very popular around the office. The work schedule was flexible, but people usually showed up at 8. When the other intern started showing up from 8:30-9, people started talking about it. Now this is supposed to be ok, as long as you put in your 8 hours. (I personally doubt that he did.) So if you are an intern, I STRONGLY recommend that you show up at whatever start time they give you for your first day, even if they also say that “if you don’t like to start as early, you can come in later.” They talked to him about this, but only said that “you can come in later, just make sure you put in the 8 hours,” end of discussion. He also had a nasty habit of falling asleep at the computer…everyone knew this, but nobody ever said anything. Also spent a lot of time surfing the web…people knew it, but only said “it’s ok to take breaks just make sure your work gets done.”</p>
<p>So maybe he would have been viewed as a good employee had someone said something to him and he changed his behavior, but hey, some people don’t want to get into this stuff when they know the kid will be gone soon enough. I don’t know what they told him in exit interviews, but I know that his internal review wasn’t good. That’s probably the easiest way to deal with an intern. If you don’t like the performance, let it go and forget about inviting the kid back.</p>
<p>So first of all, I would recommend not doing the above things. If you are still getting bad vibes, you need to ask your supervisor what is going wrong and what you can improve. Work hard, if you feel uneasy, ask what you need to do, and your supervisor will tell you. They’ll remember that you take initiative when review time comes.</p>
<p>I’m currently three weeks into an 8 month co-op right now…can’t tell how things are gonna go. Seemed like my mentor was just dumping stuff on me with little guidance, and I wasn’t getting a lot of help if I asked questions. Tough situation to deal with, because when that happens you are nervous about asking any questions. Things are getting better and I am getting some positive feedback now, but I still have that sour taste that leaves me a little uncertain. If I feel like the situation is regressing, I’ll talk with my mentor and see what can be done.</p>
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<p>Sometimes its just politics. Maybe his superiors just wanted to have the spot available for one of their contacts, ie son/daughter/niece/nephew. Its just the luck of the draw sometimes. They may have liked him and thought he was well suited for the job but would rather let him go to have a close relative take the position.</p>
<p>We give every intern a very honest exit interview. Sounds like this is not an organized, thoughtful firm. Internships are a learning experience, good or bad.</p>
<p>I would encourage the student to call his boss and talk it through. It’s a small world and if he’ll be seeking work in the same industry it could become a problem and he needs to know how to address it.</p>
<p>When I’m hiring kids who’ve done internships at a competing firm I will usually ask about him there of someone he did not give as a reference.</p>
<p>Dsmo, put in your eight hours? Lol! You sure didn’t work for me!</p>
<p>Ha. Was working hourly, going over 40 hours for the week would probably have gotten me in trouble for drawing overtime. I worked ten hours a day, four days a week whenever I wanted to take Fridays off. I would guess that virtually all intern / co-op positions outside of banking, legal, medical are paid hourly and generally don’t allow for more than 40 hours per week.</p>
<p>A lot of very good internships (in terms of experience) are unpaid, so no worries about overtime there.</p>
<p>A rule of thumb is that if you’re on time you’re ten minutes late. Doesn’t mean that an occasional late due to commute is impermissible but firm schedule or no firm schedule, be there early.</p>
<p>If you are unsure about how to do something, ask.</p>
<p>If you seem to run out of work, volunteer or otherwise ask.</p>
<p>When you turn something in, after an appropriate interval, ask for feedback.</p>
<p>When you see that in circumstances A and B you are asked to do X and Y, do X and Y without being asked when you see circumstances A and B arise.</p>
<p>In general, leave when the day’s job is done, not when the clock reaches nominal quitting time.</p>
<p>Be aware of office politics but do not participate in same; just use your acquired knowledge to keep from stepping into a minefield if you can at all avoid it. Be mindful of the chain of command and observe it.</p>
<p>Treat the internship seriously for its own sake, don’t approach the internship as getting your ticket punched or an opportunity to spend some time in an interesting place like NYC, DC, or whereever.</p>
<p>Don’t do the following: sit at a table in a cafeteria or restaurant at or near your work place and in a normal or loud tone of voice talk about people in the office you don’t like or think are weird or whatever. You have <em>no</em> idea who is sitting near you and you have no idea of who knows whom. If you are with a group of people doing same and they persist, find a graceful way to get up and leave. (Hard to lay down the law to your intern peers, which can be just as socially damaging in another direction…just avoid it.)
In general, when talking about your job and the people, maintain situational awareness of who is around and if you must discuss, do so in a quiet voice. [All this drawn from an anecdote that occurred in the US Senate cafeteria of all places…hard to think of a worse place to engage in that kind of behavior unless the CIA or Goldmann Sachs has that kind of cafeteria.]</p>
<p>That’s not that bad…I have a friend who got an internship with a Fortune 500 manufacturing company. He said that he thought everything was going fine in the internship except for the fact that his boss never gave him any feedback and seemed reluctant to help him. Then one day out of nowhere his boss took him to the HR person and they basically just said “You’re not what we’re expected” and they fired him. Talk about destroying someone’s self esteem eh? My friend was contemplating suicide and a bunch of other stuff for months afterwards and he’s still bitter about the whole situation. This kid did great in college, had good extracurriculars and was a happy kid. It was weird seeing him so broken down…</p>
<p>Sometimes internships are the idea of high management, and the folks in the trenches are stuck supervising an intern that they never wanted. It is just extra work for them.</p>
<p>Always keep an eye out for opportunities to lighten your manager’s load or contribute in a positive way. A bit of wise guidance that one manager gave a group of interns in a consulting company was that there is client work (min. 40 hours billable) and then there is overhead, marketing, and extra - unbillable, not on the clock, but expected. If your bosses are on salary and working 50-60 hours a week, so are you, no matter what you put on your time card. It’s called being a team player. That’s how the white collar world works. If you don’t like it, get a blue-collar union job.</p>
<p>In the work place you will find much less guidance and feedback.</p>
<p>If you are a salaried employee, you stay until the job is done, I’m sure all will agree.</p>
<p>But if you are paid hourly, as I would guess interns are at most manufacturing / IT companies, I’d be highly suspect of what toadstool says. Maybe there are some companies out there that force this kind of behavior…but I really doubt it, as this is a huge no-no with regards to employment laws. Corporations are very good at knowing the rules and following them. Falsifying a timecard, even to the company’s advantage, will likely lead to trouble. Wouldn’t worry about it much, a good company won’t put you in a situation like this. Companies that pull crap like this end up with disgruntled employees that file expensive lawsuits.</p>
<p>The quality of an internship is primarily dependent on the manager you report to and secondarily on the effort you put into it. As one poster said earlier, if the internship was the dream of an executive that is then unceremoniously handed down to staff to run, it could be a trainwreck in the making.</p>
<p>Before you do any sort of internship or internship program, make sure you have some understanding on what you’ll be doing, who you report to etc. This will save you a lot of hassle down the road!</p>
<p>This thread is worrying me… I accepted an internship for this summer already. During the interview, I interviewed with several people and had lunch with two. I got a very strong vibe that two of the people I interviewed with and one of the people I had lunch with didn’t want me there. Their body language made this pretty apparent. They had their arms crossed, stared at the wall on the side the whole time (30 minutes), and asked very negative sounding questions. I guess I’m just looking for advice. What can I do to make a positive impression once I’m there? Maybe, they see interns as more work for them?</p>
<p>Are the people you interviewed with going to be your bosses? If so, I might start worrying if you didn’t feel a connection with them. Usually what happens for college students is that the company sends a director or someone to hire interns but then these directors just hire them and HR is left to assign them to managers so it’s possible to work for a boss you never met during the interview process ie my friend who got fired…I haven’t heard of any of my other friends getting fired except for him so your chances of an internship going bad is still pretty rare…</p>
<p>I’m glad you say its rare. I have my fingers crossed… I did interview with the boss, but he was nice. It was just some of the other employees that didn’t seem to want me there.</p>
<p>Things happen.</p>
<p>I know my internship, which I enjoyed, had it’s downs. The main thing was that it seemed like everything was fine throughout and no one mentioned anything was wrong. So, I continued doing what I did everyday, acting the same, and so on. Then, when reviews came in at the end I was bombarded with criticism. Not about the work I did, but more about my personality I suppose. </p>
<p>I didn’t talk enough. I seemed nervous. I didn’t ask enough questions and leverage their experience. Also stuff that made them question my client service ability. The funny thing is, if you asked anyone I know if I am quiet, they would laugh at me. I talk all the time and am fairly personable. </p>
<p>My coworkers were busy though. I was sometimes busy and it was my first time in that setting (this was an accounting firm). If they would have said something earlier, I would have began to be more inquisitive and had more conversations with them. However, 8 weeks and with the exception of my manager saying I was “a bit nervous” after the first few days (which I chalked up to actual nervousness and not my personality and being quiet), no one said anything.</p>
<p>They liked my work ethic and I did a great job. But they wish I would have broken out of my shell I guess. The last day when we went out to lunch, I did, and they said they wished I were more like that the entire time. </p>
<p>However, I have to ask, what do they expect? They never said anything to me and I made it clear to them from the start that I always wanted feedback. They didn’t really give it to me.</p>
<p>I handled the criticism well, mainly because I saw where they were coming from (though, in my honest opinion, they were harsh on me as an intern, better for me though… helps me improve). So, because of that I suppose, I got the full time offer. Which was good.</p>
<p>Though, I’ll say, if it was solely based on my experience with them (and my experience at the firm wasn’t also with regards to other people I had met), I might not have accepted the offer. </p>
<p>I mean, I even emailed some of them for another final goodbye (in addition to one in person) and out of 5 of them, only 2 emailed me back (1 of them was a partner, so assume he is busy, but still). </p>
<p>So, not every experience is perfect. It’s still an experience though, something that good or bad, you hopefully come away learning something. It’s better than not having it at all. And in fact, a bad experience–though it depends on how bad–can sometimes help you improve. I know my experience was helpful. Even if a bit of a surprise/shock at first. </p>
<p>But don’t let bad stories scare you. They are few st part. and far between for the most part.</p>
<p>CollegeKid, thanks for sharing your experience. You offered some good advice.</p>
<p>Wow collegekid, your experience sounds almost EXACTLY like my friends. Only difference is that he got fired after 6 weeks…guess it just depends on your boss haha.</p>