Demystifying Internships
A session with Mallory Becraft on thoughtful career exploration
Did you have an internship when you were growing up?
My summer internship before the start of college included A LOT of alphabetizing, filing, and the physical binding together of portfolio analyses with little plastic spirals. I also fetched food for high net-worth clients and all the other analysts on the team. And I was paid just enough to cover the cost of driving two hours round trip to and from this internship in Los Angeles, which sadly didn’t expose me fully to the ins and outs of being an investment consultant. Nevertheless, in the larger game of deciding it or not it, I decided that I wanted to try other paths before delving into this one any further.
Today, internships and summer jobs have served as new signals learners feel obligated to flash in the college application process in order to differentiate themselves from one another. But, as my co-host and friend Michael Horn and I discussed in a recent CGN live webinar, it’s not always easy to figure out how to find a good internship or pick the right summer job. More importantly, it’s not clear what we’re supposed to be getting out of these forms of work.
Thankfully, our guest, Mallory Becraft, the associate director of career coaching and campus partnerships at The University of Iowa, did a fantastic job of sharing some smaller, concrete steps young people can take in their career exploration. It’s much less daunting when, as Mallory shared, “Any amount of thoughtfulness that you're putting towards your involvement in your career exploration is going to put you leaps and bounds ahead of [your peers].”
Here are a few snippets from our conversation. And apologies in advance for some of the lags in Michael’s and my video quality. We were suffering from some crazy-low bandwidth that day, but thankfully, Mallory’s answers were crystal clear.
On the larger question of finding and securing internships:
It’s okay not to have this all figured out. This isn’t about making one decision, and you’re set. Mallory shares a few ways to get started through self-assessment:
And finally, how parents can help, or at least not hinder, this process: