Reflections (4.20.09)

Apart from being enjoyable, beneficial, and a personal growth experience, my internship this past semester has been more of a wake-up call than anything else. The wake-up call is that interns are the bottom, any internship is what you make it and finally, that getting a job out of college is going to be a painful process.
Another key thing I have learned is that there is no perfect formula to handling interviews and succeeding in an internship. After my experience and hearing from many of my colleagues, I find that the bottom line is personal connection. It is all about how your personality connects with your employers. After my interview for the Women and Politics Institute went badly, I made a conscious decision to pursue my possible employer to let her know I really wanted the internship (possibly to compensate for how badly the interview went). This tactic worked because she found I was persistent and a person who does not quit. However, that could have been misconstrued as a negative quality to another person. It is important to read into your possible employers.
Any Internship is inevitably a growing experience and something that should be handled with 110% effort. Networking is crucial, and in hindsight there are always things I could have improved, but knowing I did my best will get me a recommendation letter and a step in somewhere else in the future.