Tag Archives: intern

Entry by Pat Patterson

As I have stressed numerous times, internships are invaluable experiences for both students and employers. After Indiana INTERNnet was established, some regions realized the necessity to create their own additional programs to promote the significance of internships. From a statewide perspective, Indiana internships are being promoted by Indiana INTERNnet and its regional partners. Valued partners such as the Greater Fort Wayne Chamber’s Graduate Retention Program use Indiana INTERNnet’s technology platform to facilitate internship matches among students and employers.

The Graduate Retention Program is a business/education partnership facilitated by the Workforce & Business Development Division of the Fort Wayne Chamber of Commerce:

The Graduate Retention Program is designed to attract and retain college and high school graduates in Northeast Indiana. Our strategy is to increase awareness of area employers by promoting the development of meaningful internships for college and high school students.

As Mike Landram, the Greater …

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Entry by Pat Patterson

Summer break is quickly coming to a close, and students will soon pack up their belongings and return to their college campuses.  As educators, it is best to engage these students in career services activities as soon as possible. 

The following are a few ideas to help career services professionals welcome students back to campus and encourage them to visit the career office:

Create flyers to distribute in living units and common areas, which list the first few career services events of the year, engage in social media by advertising your Facebook, Twitter, and/or LinkedIn pages, host a beginning of the year cook-out or ice cream social (perhaps the “fee” for attending can be that students have to bring a resume for review or take a Myers-Briggs Test, etc.), reward the first hundred or so students who visit the career office with t-shirts, professional resume paper, …

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Entry by Ashley Cashen, Talent Acquisition and Retention Coordinator, digitalKnowledge

Once your company’s internship ends, it’s important to make sure the communication does not end with it.  Hopefully at the end of an internship, both a company and its intern are parting ways with a positive experience to look back on.  And if everything goes as planned, both that company and the intern will want to work together in the future. 

Most interns still have one, maybe even two or three, years of school left before entering the “real world.”  So a company can go from communicating with their intern on a daily basis to not speaking to them for a year.  But, a lot of things can happen in that last year of school – your intern may attend career fairs, have job interviews, and meet potential employers.  How are you going to continue to stick …

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Entry by Pat Patterson

It is that time of the year again – your internship is wrapping up and it becomes harder for you to focus, as thoughts of the upcoming school year flood your mind.  But before you pack up your materials, say your goodbyes, and take that final step out the door, it is important to make sure that you leave your internship on a positive note.  You may have learned a lot, contributed significantly to the organization you worked with, and made great connections and even friends, but the way you end your internship may ultimately be the way you will be remembered – you don’t want to “pull a LeBron James” and leave on a negative note with your former boss releasing an open letter expressing his disapproval after you leave (sorry about that – I’m originally from Cleveland).

Anyways, with that being said, on AdAge.com …

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Entry by Courtney Sampson, Marketing and Communications Intern, Indiana State Fair

No matter what the economists say, we’ve got to face it. Times are still tough for Americans, and many companies simply aren’t hiring full-time employees. With that said, I feel pretty lucky to be a Hoosier; many of my friends who live in other states have had a difficult time finding minimum-wage jobs, and they have college degrees!

I’ve had plenty of phone and face-to-face conversations with friends about “life after college.” What are the options if you don’t have a full-time job after graduation? Well, if you’re a fan of waking up early, you could head down to the local Starbucks and see if they’re hiring any baristas. For night owls, perhaps there’s a local 24-hour diner or even the corner pub!

But if you’re trying to enter the “professional world,” maybe Starbucks isn’t your best bet…or maybe …

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Entry by Pat Patterson

This summer, I had the privilege of coordinating internships for 59 high school interns through the Common Goal Internship Program, a collaborative effort between Indiana INTERNnet and the Indianapolis Chamber aimed at motivating at-risk high school students to continue their education, graduate, and pursue higher education.  Yesterday, we celebrated the student’s successful completion of the program and recognized their host employers for offering the internship opportunities. (See pictures below)

A student intern with her employer mentor.

Throughout the summer, I visited several of the students at their places of business, and at the celebration conference, a few of the students shared their experiences at the podium on stage.  After learning more about the students’ experiences during their visits and the few students’ presentations, it became apparent how influential the internships have been in their lives. 

During their internships, the students were able to test out their …

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Entry by Ashley Cashen, Talent Acquisition and Retention Coordinator, digitalKnowledge

As you may recall in my earlier blog entries, digitalKnowledge chose to team up with the Interns for Indiana Program through Purdue University for their first internship.  We chose to go this route for a couple of reasons.  First and foremost, with this being our first internship in company history we could use the help.  Interns for Indiana has supported our internship from the beginning, including sending us resumes of students who fit our criteria and setting up an “interview fair” for us to meet these candidates. Secondly, Interns for Indiana offers funding for smaller start-up companies. 

Choosing to partner with Interns for Indiana has without a doubt been one of the best decisions we could have made.  Not only do they offer administrative support to employers, but they also provide the interns with additional educational opportunities.  Bart has had …

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Entry by Courtney Sampson, Marketing and Communications Intern, Indiana State Fair

You know, nothing’s typical at the Indiana State Fair. We’re the biggest fair in the state, attracting nearly 975,000 visitors throughout 17 days. We’ve got “the world’s largest boar” and a 25-foot tall sculpture based upon Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.” We’ve even got gigantic pumpkins, big deals and steep discounts, and real-life bears. (Oh my!)

Not that I’m biased or anything, but we’re the biggest and the best! And we sure aren’t typical. So, let me share a secret with you. It’s been a lifelong goal of mine to reach the “corner office.” You know, once you get to the corner office, it means you’re the big kahuna…the big cheese…you’ve made it to the top! Well guess what, folks? It may all be downhill from here – cause I’ve got the corner office at the Indiana State Fairgrounds!

Really, …

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Entry by Anastasiya Elaeva, Indiana INTERNnet Intern

The fun part of interning is that you never know what events you will have a chance to attend and what people you will get an opportunity to meet.  If you keep your eyes wide open, your internship can extend beyond your primary responsibilities and the department to which you are assigned.

After my Washington D.C. internship in international affairs did not work out because of differences in mine and the company’s schedules, I was desperately looking for something in Indiana.  I picked up the phone and called the Indiana Chamber of Commerce. To be honest, at that point of time, in mid-May, I did not expect that there would be anything available.  I picked up the phone because I thought that trying every single opportunity would be the right thing to do.

To my surprise, I was offered an exciting internship assisting …

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Entry by Pam Norman, Indiana INTERNnet Executive Director

Yesterday I had the privilege of serving on a panel that provided advice to thirty downtown Indy interns.  The event was sponsored by the International Center of Indianapolis, and the interns represented corporate, nonprofit, and government sectors.

Takeaways from the discussion included:
• Improve your skill set by taking on more than you think you are capable of
• Track internship projects so it will be easy to update your resume
• Develop your professional network; opportunities are just a business card away
• Seek advice from management; people enjoy talking about their path to success
• Dress for success; dress for the job you want, not the one you have
• Be authentic; consider your internship a ten-week interview
• Soft skills are important to Indiana employers; make sure your skill set contains them

I’ve already received emails …

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Entry by Ashley Cashen, Talent Acquisition and Retention Coordinator, digitalKnowledge

digitalKnowledge strives to hire recent college graduates for their fresh perspectives and eagerness to continue learning.  Our company tries to hire 2-3 Associate Consultants each year.  A lot of on-campus recruiting occurs through career fairs, class presentations, and on-campus interviews.  We hire talented, entrepreneurial graduates, but they come into our company with little to no real knowledge of our business.

Bart, our intern, has been with us for two months now, and while that may seem like a short amount of time, he is “one of us.”  He knows about digitalKnowledge, our values, our processes – formal and informal, and he is part of our culture and environment.  Through his time with us, he has sat in on client meetings, conference calls, and staff meetings.  Not to mention, he sits next to three of our developers each day and has …

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Entry by Pat Patterson

This month, the blog entries I included were all about professional branding, focusing on how to brand yourself through online media.  Although it is important to be aware of how you brand yourself in the virtual world, don’t forget to be mindful of how you present yourself in the real world.

Whether you like it or not, people are going to judge you on the way you present yourself, specifically how you dress.  Most of you have heard “rules of thumb,” such as “dress for the job you want, not the job you have” or “it is better to be overdressed than underdressed.”  A business friend of mine directed my attention to an intern’s perspective on internship attire – among the few reasons why Hetrick intern Sean Litke overdresses for his internship, Litke mentions:

Third, even as an intern, I feel taken more seriously when I …

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Entry by Courtney Sampson, Marketing and Communications Intern, Indiana State Fair

Rumor has it that we’re officially 432 hours away from opening day at the Indiana State Fair. Not that I’m counting or anything, but for those of you who lack math skills (like me), 432 hours = 18 days. Can somebody say, “eeeks?!”

Well, have no fear, Fair fans. For some employees around here, State Fair prep is down to a science! After all, when you work here for 10, 15, 20, even 30+ years, you get into the groove of things after awhile. When you’re an intern, you’ve got to pull yourself up by your bootstraps (flip-flops, in my case) and hang on for a fast-paced ride of a lifetime!

If you’re wondering what goes on pre-Fair, I’ve got a few pictures to share with you. My colleague, Kris Karol, snapped these shots late last week. Pretty soon, …

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Entry by Lindsay Davis, Solutions Marketing Intern, Interactive Intelligence, Inc.

We live in a world where it is now socially acceptable to follow people, where “tweeting” is used in everyday language, and where we learn to describe any emotion we may have in 140 characters or less.

Thank you, Twitter.

Above all else, we live in a world where corporations can use this simple animated bird-themed website to reach out to their customers and employees while gaining feedback in return.  I gained firsthand experience of this during my first few weeks at Interactive Intelligence.

I’ve “tweeted” before, but it was always meaningless updates about my whereabouts, or what I was doing.  Never did I imagine Twitter as a marketing tool, until now. These days if you’re not up-to-date with the latest and greatest, you’re at a huge disadvantage, especially when it comes to company branding and customer service.

With “hashtags” …

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Entry by Pat Patterson

If you are not already on Twitter, then you are missing out on a huge, free opportunity to market yourself. Twitter, at its core, is a marketing tool. Companies use Twitter to market their goods and services; it only makes sense for you, as an internship/job seeker, to use Twitter to market your skills.

Since you do not include as much personal and professional information in your Twitter account, it is easier to create a professional Twitter profile. Here is a recap of the tips to build a professional Twitter profile, which I included in the July INTERNnetwork and last Friday’s blog:

Use your real name, use a head shot photo as your profile picture, create a Twitter name that is appropriate and easy to remember, list a website for yourself – a professional profile such as LinkedIn, an online resume, an online portfolio, or your …

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