My top 5 favorite things about working for Indiana INTERNnet

This week is unfortunately my final week as a member of the Indiana INTERNnet team. There have been so many great things about this experience, so for my last blog post I have decided to reflect on my top five favorite parts of my summer internship:

5. Doing Research

Coming up with blog and social media content every week isn’t easy – it required a lot of research and reading. Luckily, I enjoy those two things when it comes to career development! As a young professional myself, each time I would tweet an article or pull from one for a blog post, I was taking that advice as well. During the school year, I am not able to be as proactive about my career as I would like. This experience has allowed me to devote time every week to reading about the latest trends in resumes, cover letters and more, which has been a great benefit to my career. I intend to continue to make time for those types of discoveries moving forward.

4. Trusting My Voice

A major lesson I learned over the course of this internship was to trust my ideas and to not be afraid of sharing them. I put this into practice yesterday at KSM Consulting, as the company hosted a design thinking session about the future of Indiana INTERNnet. As a student and intern, I was asked to present my thoughts on the organization and how it could be improved. I was sitting in a room full of people with higher degrees and salaries than my own, which was intimidating. Still, I spoke up and shared my thoughts each time I had them. It was a great experience!

3. Attending the Indiana INTERNnet Engagement Events

Over the course of this summer, I helped plan and execute several intern engagement events around Indianapolis. Of the four that have occurred so far, I was able to attend three of them. Though I’m still bummed that I missed out on the Indianapolis Zoo event, I had a great time at the others. The first event, hosted in partnership with The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, was a day full of fun and the programming was so enjoyable that we invited the speaker, Samantha Martin, back for our most recent event at the Indiana State Fair. A more casual evening was spent on the roof of the Fountain Square Theatre building at our second event, which was hosted by the Indy Chamber. That venue was overall my favorite of the events because it was a view of the Indy skyline I’d never seen before and the rooftop garden was delightful.

Speaking of cool events, today is the last day to register for the final engagement event, so you better head over to Eventbrite immediately!

2. Making New Connections

As I mentioned in a blog post earlier this summer, networking is very important to advancing one’s career and I was able to meet a lot of great new people this summer. Everyone at the Indiana Chamber gave me a warm welcome in May and I was able to get to know several staff members well. Outside of our office, I met with representatives of the Indiana Commission for Higher Education and other state government workers. Through an assignment for BizVoice magazine (which will be published later this fall), I was fortunate enough to get to know the founder and CEO of Fort-Wayne based marketing agency Cyclone Social. Each new person that I’ve met this summer was gracious about giving me bits of advice or sharing some of their career history with me when prompted. I enjoyed making those types of personal connections with people of different backgrounds.

1. Advocating for Internships

My favorite thing about working for Indiana INTERNnet has been working for an organization that I truly believe in. By the time I graduate next May, I will have completed at least six internships. Yes, six. Though my courses in public relations and advertising have been great, my internships have impacted me the most throughout my college career. I am a huge proponent of work-and-learn experiences! If I could, I would get every college student to take on an internship, which is part of why I have enjoyed working for this organization so much. It’s been a pleasure to learn about other internship programs around the state, and to know that I have played at least a small role in connecting students to internship opportunities through my work.

I am so grateful for the opportunity to have been the Communications and Special Events Intern here! It’s going to be very difficult to leave this organization and move on to my next opportunity. I made some invaluable connections – and friendships – this summer. As you can tell from looking back at my previous blog posts, learned a lot, too. Moving forward, I know that I will continue to advocate for internships and I’ll always refer fellow Hoosiers to Indiana INTERNnet for internship needs because this is a truly great organization.