Unclaimed Internships
This is a public service announcement for all you young designers & developers out there looking to get started in the web industry. There is a conversation happening again and again at Studiomates that I think you should be aware of.
Studiomates is pretty high-traffic in terms of interesting guests covering a broad swath of awesome. Lately, at our guest lunches, we can’t seem to avoid the subject of interns. What I’ve found interesting is that the conversations all follow the same arc. They start out as a longing and turn into a sort of dejection punctuated with lines like “I’d love an intern, but they’re too much work”.
I was raised in a “waste not, want not” household and I hate to see great potential internships go to waste because of some perceived quantity of effort. The reality is that internships only seem like a lot of work. When done well, they are a huge boon for both the intern and the employer, they improve the knowledge base of the industry as a whole, and they lead to life-long industry friendships. It wouldn’t hurt to have a few more around.
Quick disclaimer: In this article, I am talking about internships with individuals or small teams, not larger agencies that have whole processes in place for chewing through interns.
Effort
Thinking of interns as “too much work” seems to put the blame on the intern, but the reality is that the employer holds much of the responsibility. The problem is that most employers are tremendous practitioners of design & development, but not as practiced in the art of management. After doing the work to find an intern, they don’t always know how to get the most out of them. There are two things that I think can improve the quality of the internship and reduce the sense of effort.
Ask for help with administrative tasks. Creative work is challenging when interruptions are high. Offloading your distracting, administrative tasks to your intern will improve your productivity. Sure, it can be uncomfortable to tell other people what to do, particularly if the work is not glamorous, but as long as you aren’t giving your intern only menial tasks, you shouldn’t hesitate to lighten your daily load by asking them to mail a package or make copies.
Be willing to delegate. Too many folks in our industry micromanage their interns instead of trusting them. Of course interns will seem like a lot of work if you have to constantly scrutinize their work as well as your own. There’s no leverage in that. Let your interns solve problems iteratively. Check in at the end of each iteration, give thoughtful feedback, and point them in the right direction. It may take them a bit longer (in terms of days) than if you had done it on your own, but the effort required of you to get the project done will be minimal and the whole time you can be getting work done on your other projects.
The moral of the story here is that employers have just as much a responsibility to keep an internship effortless as does the intern. Let’s have a look at the intern’s responsibilities, shall we?
Initiative
Hi interns. This is may just be Old Man Cameron talk and I’ll probably catch a lot of flack for saying it, but it seems to me that kids these days have talent up to their eyeballs and initiative up to the soles of their feet (standing position, not jump kicking). If you are under 25 right now, I am almost certainly talking about you.
I don’t think I am alone in thinking this way and it’s useful for younger web folk to understand that this is a prevailing attitude. The interesting implication of that attitude is that when you are trying to land an internship or even a great job, you aren’t really competing on talent. Talent is a prerequisite, but it doesn’t get you the job.
Instead, you should focus on your new favorite word: “initiative.” You need to be able to be given a problem and just go to town on it with little supervision. You need to be able to internalize feedback and make adjustments to your work accordingly. You need to be able to take notice of when you are idle and generate some possible suggestions for how you can be made productive. You need to be looking out for ways to help that your employer hasn’t even noticed yet. If you can do that you are invaluable.
The good news is that if you are one of the under-25 crowd and you are genuinely a hard-worker with some solid initiative, you are extremely well-poised to get great work and dominate the web industry. Your peers are weak sauce and you are Sriracha.
Part II
This post was getting a bit long and, in deference to our modern ADD world, I broke it in two. The second post is all about the implicit contract between employers and interns and what each should expect of themselves and each other. Bon appetite.
