I won’t sugar coat it for you, I loathed my first internship program which was at the National Museums of Kenya. Now, the main reason why it didn’t rock my boat other than being an unpaid position, it was because there wasn’t much to do there.
You see, interns are not expected to do much. They spend most of their days on Facebook and chatting away with their friends on Whatsup and all this social networks and before you know it, it’s already 5 in the evening and it’s time to go home. The next day, the cycle continues and what do you, know! Three months or six months of your internship are gone with the wind.
Now, my second internship was what I was hoping to get while I was at the National Museums of Kenya.
This time around I was stationed in a busy news agency in Nairobi. One of the many reasons that made this particular internship worthwhile for me was that Intern or no intern you had to work. You had to go out there, get a story, write it and get critiqued for it in a room full of journalists who would laugh while the editor pointed out the many errors in your story…..and man, there were many errors in those stories!
At the end of it all, I learned some useful rules/tips you should be armed with when you starting out your internship. They worked for me; I hope they will work magic for you too.
1.Don’t just sit there and say you are an intern…..Work Hard!
As an intern your objective should be to make yourself valuable. It doesn’t matter even if you are doing crappy jobs around the office or writing crappy stories like in my case…true you might be underqualified for most things you do, but do it like your job depends on it.
Once you’ve proven yourself worthy on the crap tasks, ask for more work around the office and your co-workers will start noticing that you are doing something and not just sitting all day. You never know where you luck lies….a lot of times the invaluable intern gets offered a job at the end of the internship.
2.Sometimes Unpaid Internships Are Worth it.
I was never paid at my first internship at the National Museums and neither at the News Agency. It would have been nice and kind of motivating but anyway, this is Kenya and that’s how things work. If you paid, you are one lucky sod, if you are not, thank God you have an internship to talk about in the first place.
But I digress, with all the nasty things that people rave about unpaid internships, there’s some good that comes out of it and that is EXPERIENCE. While you may want to get a job at the end of your internship, experience and learning about the loops that come with that particular job is far more important.
And while you are interning, your goal as you learn and gain experience is to make the company believe that they will have a hard time getting another intern like you when your internship is done. If you my dear get to that point, they will need to make you an offer and bring you on full time and voila you will have yourself a job, thanks to your efforts.
3.You are now in the professional world….Act like it.
Interns love playing games and no, the games are not fun to watch. They come in late or not show up for work and then call around noon to say that they have a stomach bug or something…..please, that sounds like a hangover.
And the most heinous of them all, dressing as if you are going to some club in Lang’ata or Westlands. It’s pretty simple, want respect and want to be treated like the rest of the employees? Then observe what they wear and heed to the dress code.
Last word is this, you are now an intern, you may not be getting paid but you are learning something. Three or six months down the line you will no longer be an intern…what will be your next move. Think ahead, network as much as possible, show the company you are working for that you are a gem and they cannot afford to dispose you when your term is over.
Be a strategic and a valuable intern.
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