If your young charges are just stuffing envelopes and making coffee, you’re missing out
You’ve shown the interns where the cafeteria and bathrooms are. They have their employee badges prominently displayed and a copy of your policies and procedures tucked under their arms. Now what do you do with them?
Across the country each year, college students will break away from their campuses for meaningful “real world” experiences. You certainly don’t want to dampen their enthusiasm nor simply turn them loose within your company.
So, just how do you channel your intern’s excitement for this “real” job into an experience that is:
- valuable for your company,
- meaningful for the student, AND
- doesn’t take up 90 percent of your work day?
As a major academic medical center situated on one of the nation’s largest student campuses, The Ohio State University Medical Center may be the “Internship Capital” of the United States. We have 50,000+ students to choose from. College interns work in all of our research, education and patient care areas and in support-service areas such as Communications and Marketing.
(Read what an Ohio State Medical Center intern looks for in an internship.)
Teaching, mentoring and helping young people establish their careers is a part of our mission. Ask our administrators, faculty and staff about their work with students and the vast majority would tell you it’s enjoyable, rewarding and one of the reasons they chose to work at Ohio State.
Within our Communications and Marketing Department, here are some of the things we’ve discovered to be beneficial when helping college students take their first career steps:
1. Hire well. Make your recruitment, interviewing, hiring and orientation processes as professional for interns as it is for other employees. Select a student who brings interests and skills to your workplace that are compatible with the job.
2. Connect. We usually try to link a student to one or two employees or a smaller group within our larger department. This helps students bond and provides the opportunity for a mentoring situation. Students can focus on one area and learn more about it. Some students stay with an original group. Others may move on for different learning experiences.
We also encourage interns to meet people at all levels of the organization. Interns often go along to meetings or on media interviews to find out more about the organization and its leadership, for example.
3. Grow. We look for students who can work with us for one year or longer. This lessens the pressure to rush students into the worksite. By keeping fewer students longer, the students can learn more and contribute more to our medical center.
4. Varied activities. We try to make sure our interns get to participate in several different activities—town meetings, media events, publications, Web projects, research symposia, holiday celebrations, safety initiatives and development projects.
We also try to ensure the interns are working “alongside” rather than “for” other staff. In other words, we don’t dump the unwanted projects on the interns. If we have to open 50,000 boxes that hold a light-up giveaway or pass out 13,000 beach towels, everyone helps. (We’ve done both of these.)
5. Make it fun. Handing out T-shirts, taking part in community challenges and volunteering for community outreach days can all be very enjoyable events. Keep gripes and office gossip away from the students.
6. Responsibility. In addition to helping, our interns typically have a project or two they are responsible for. This might be regular postings of signs at one of our hospital buildings, keeping the intranet calendar up to date or writing a monthly story on benefits in our newsletter.
Ownership of a project allows students to learn about project management from creating schedules to following deadlines and is a source of pride for the students. It also looks good on a resume.
7. Think career. We encourage students to keep a list of what they’ve worked on and samples of their work. If a student writes an article for our newsletter, we try to post it on our intranet and also use it for a news release. This gives the student several pieces to put in a professional portfolio.
If you have a photographer at an event, take the student’s picture for inclusion in a portfolio or at least to send to Mom and Dad. Write a blanket letter of recommendation when the student begins looking for permanent work. Help the student network by making a call or sending an e-mail to help find a graduate assistantship or an entry-level job in your company or elsewhere.
8. Food. Whenever you have an event, send the leftover food home with the students. We’ve never had a student turn down an extra pizza or a few cans of soda. Well-fed students are usually happy workers.
Lori Smith is a resource planning analyst and supervises interns at The Ohio State University Medical Center’s Department of Communications and Marketing. Ginny Halloran is an editor at Ohio State’s Medical Center.
