Summer and internships go together.  Summer equals longer days, hotter weather, vacations and college students looking for credits and knowledge of marketing and advertising through internships.  Gone are the days of lifeguarding jobs, waitressing and babysitting.  Now, if students are not working as an intern during the summer at least their junior year, they will have more difficulty getting a job when they graduate.

These kids are eager to learn, but so many of them do no more than data entry, making copies and filing. We have been guilty of it as I know many other companies have.

But this year we’ve changed that and hopefully other companies have as well.  If these students represent the future of advertising and marketing, it is our responsibility to give them a good learning experience that will encourage them to get into our industry.  

Ideas for improving your interns experience:

•    Assign a senior executive to be their mentor.  Not someone from HR.
•    Provide one to two orientation days to educate them on all of what your company does.
•    Determine before they arrive what some thoughtful and interesting projects are for them to work on.  Most likely these are smart kids that can probably add some real value.
•    Formalize interaction with other individuals within the company.  Lunch once a week with people from all departments.
•    Check in weekly to be sure they understand what they are doing and how it fits into the bigger picture.
•    At the end of the summer, have them fill out an evaluation questionnaire and be sure to provide them with the recommendation letters they need.
•    Take the data from the questionnaires and plan next year’s program based on their feedback.

Internships didn’t exist when I was in school.  I wish they had.  We need smarter, fresh thinking in our industry and we need to take responsibility for bringing young people along and into our business.