What to do after you finish your Internship
Congratulations! You’ve finished your summer internship (or are about to) and are getting ready to get back to campus to start your next school. Before you get too busy, here are five things you can do right now to make sure you have properly assessed and reflected on your summer experience, and are ready to move forward with your second year.
Track and write down what you worked on
When you spend a summer focused on maximizing your summer internship and succeeding in the role, sometimes it’s easy to forget to keep track of what you did, worked out, and the outcomes or output of your work. If this describes your summer, one of the very first things you can do is to write down what you did and worked on during the summer. Make sure to include any projects, initiatives, programs, etc. This will also be helpful as you think about updating your resume to get ready for recruiting in the fall. Furthermore, make sure to update your LinkedIn profile with a few sentences or bullets about your summer experience.
Stay in touch with the people you built relationships with
Just because the summer is over, doesn’t mean that you have to stop engaging with the people and employees you built relationships with. Make sure to take stock of the individuals who you got to know this summer that you want to continue to stay in touch with and find ways to reconnect and engage with them throughout the second year. Relationships build over time, so take the opportunity to figure out how to take them with you
Summarize what you gained from the experience
As you head into the second year, it can be easy to get back into the busyness and hustle of business school without thinking through or processing the experience you just went through. Before you get too deep into the quarter/semester, take time to summarize and synthesize the key learnings from the summer. Think about the most important takeaways that you learned about yourself, the role, the company, or the industry/function.
Practice telling your story
Throughout your time in business school you’ve had to tell your story hundreds of times, whether it’s to classmates, recruiters, hiring managers or your fellow employees over the summer. With another experience under your belt, you now have more material to use to update the story you tell moving forward. This will be key, especially for those who are going to be networking and recruiting in the fall. Start to incorporate elements from the summer into your story, and practice it out loud, or virtually with classmates and peers.
Strategize and plan for your next year of school
As Ben Franklin once said, “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail,” make sure to set yourself up for success by thinking about how you want to maximize the rest of your time in business school. Certainly, finding a full-time employment offer will play a role in this, but given that you have one year left, start thinking through what you want to make sure you do and accomplish before you leave. This could be thinking about experiences you want to have, courses you want to take, or skills that you want to build, but with some foresight and time, jotting down some goals and plans will ensure you have a path to success.