Eric Woodard - The Ultimate Guide to Internships: 100 Steps to Get a Great Internship and Thrive in It

Copyright 2015 by Eric Woodard

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Published by Allworth Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

Allworth Press is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. , a Delaware corporation. www.allworth.com

Cover design by Chris Ritchie

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-62153-438-9

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62153-456-3

Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to my family, whom I love so much.

INTERNSHIP: A learning experience guided by a mentor in the workplace, which supports the academic or career goals of a student not employed there professionally.

ALSO BY ERIC WOODARD

Your Last Day of School: 56 Ways You Can Be a Great Intern and Turn Your Internship into a Job

Why Internships Are Good: The Best Education Money Cant Buy

How Do I Find an Internship?

ALL MINE

Unless stated otherwise, all ideas and opinions expressed in this book are my ownthey dont necessarily reflect the beliefs of any people or organizations I have worked with or for.

Contents

Acknowledgments

T his book includes some content from previous work but also lots of new material. It is the culmination of wisdom and support I have been blessed to receive for so long from so many. Without the support of numerous friends, colleagues, and my familythis book would not be.

I am grateful to Skyhorse Publishing for finding me and working with me to publish this book. It has been the most pleasant and wonderful surprise to work with them on this project.

Additionally, I would very much like to thank the legions of interns Ive had over the years. So often, regardless of whether I was a good manager or not, their excellent work demonstrated to me time after time how great interns can be a force of nature when it comes to serving others and making a positive impact in the world. Thank you, my former interns. You know who you are.

I would also like to thank First Lady/Senator/Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton for showing me what it means to be a great leader and accepting me as one of her interns so long ago. I also want to thank all the fantastic colleagues I had the pleasure to work with over the years in Hillaryland. It is there that I started as an intern and learned how to be a pro. If youre reading this and you served with me in the White House, the Senate, or the State Department, Im talking about you.

It goes without saying that I am also so grateful to the many fantastic people I learn so much from every day at the Smithsonian.

This book is dedicated to my family. So much of what I know, who I am, and what I can do is a credit to my parents who I love so much, John and Dixie Woodard.

Massive appreciation goes to my sweet, smart, and beautiful daughter Piper, and my indomitable, brave, amazing sons Fletch and Deacon. The only reason I was able to work on this book with three toddlers in the house is because they are such fantastic kids.

Last, I want to acknowledge that this book would not have been possible without the encouragement, inspiration, advice, and love of my beautiful smart, fearless, fantastic wife Keri. Because of her, my life is so full, and I learn so much. Id be her intern anytime.

Introduction

You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

A re you about to take that great leap between school and work? If so, listen up.

If you are anything like I was when I took my first steps into the working world, you are bursting at the seams to take that leap. It feels like you should be ready for this moment, but you wonder, Am I prepared? As you approach the academic finish line, you feel like youve done more than enough to earn the worlds respect without question. But are you getting the respect you feel you deserve? As you leap into the working world, will you land on your feet?

There is a persistent meta-narrative out there that says, Study hard, follow the rules, and you will be successful! Until fairly recently, that might have been good advice. But, increasingly, one need only look around to recognize how such promises now ring hollow. Young professionals trying to bridge the divide between school and work cannot rely on that narrative anymore. In recent years, unemployment for those between the ages of twenty and twenty-four has had a pesky habit of running at least twice as high as unemployment among everybody else. Those numbers are pretty daunting if youre a young person headed into the workplace. Even more, if youve spent zillions of dollars to go to school and are in debt up to your eyeballs, you could be asking yourself, OMG! Was this all worth it?!? How am I ever going to repay all this money!?

Dont panic. It was all worth it. However, Im afraid I have some bad news for you. To excel in todays competitive work world, all those years in the classroom alone arent enough. You need something more. Most young people leaping into todays job market lack two things: a niche and career capital.

A niche is your specialty. The thing you are the best in the world at. Dont get me wrong, its great to be well rounded so you can make all those little cross-disciplinary connections that others may miss. But you also need to have a specialty. The thing that you are known for. Thomas Huxley once said, An educated man should know everything about something and something about everything. Nowadays lots of young professionals are pretty good at knowing something about everything, but very few know everything about something. To succeed in todays working world, you need to know everything about something. That is your niche.

Career capital is the evidence to show that you do know everything about something and that you can offer more value in a particular area than anybody else. Plenty of young professionals today focus on the passion they have in a specific area. Passion is great and can fuel lifelong devotion to a specific subject. But in the working world, passion is not enough by itself. You also need to build career capital.

How do you establish a niche and get career capital? You get an internship, and you crush it. That is what this book is all about.

Being the clueless new person on the first day of the job has a long tradition. In the past, it has been understood that most people rarely know what the hell they are doing on their first day. There was a time when employers generally assumed that a new hires first several years on the job would be mostly on-the-job training. At that time, it was more acceptable because once hired, the trend was that most employees might remain with the same organization for their whole career.