[ • Think in advance about what you want to accomplish by using interns. Make sure you know the skill sets most relevant to your needs and review your wish list at least annually. • Select well. The best chance to ensure a successful internship is to select high-caliber interns with appropriate qualifications. The more thought you put into the selection process, the better the chance for good outcomes. • Set clear objectives. Develop assignments that will match interns’ skill levels and are realistic considering the time available. Discrete projects with firm deadlines are often the easiest to assign successfully to interns. • Provide an infrastructure that will allow your interns to succeed. The orientation, mentoring, and feedback that are essential for permanent hires are important for interns, too. A thorough orientation tailored to what an intern needs to know to succeed in your organization— especially the unwritten rules— can pay long-term benefits.
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• Review compensation. At least once a year, review intern salaries to make sure they are in line with what your competitors offer in order to attract the caliber of intern you seek. Many companies now offer housing stipends in addition to salary. You may want to explore this option if your company is based in a high-cost location. • Help interns develop social networks. Employers increasingly recognize the importance of social interaction to today’s workforce, so more of them are choosing to include social activities as part of their internship programs. • Take advantage of exit interviews. The best person to identify ways to make better use of future interns is the intern working in your office right now. Providing suggestions for process improvements should be a required assignment for all interns. • Develop a structured intern-tofull-time conversion process. A successful internship program identifies ideal candidates for permanent positions. Make the most of it. Have a system in place so your top interns will be offered permanent positions—and will want to accept them!
sophomore or even the freshman year. Many aim for students to have multiple summers of experience with their firm under their belt by graduation. A few companies will only hire their own former interns for entry-level, post-graduation positions. The result: students are having to make internship decisions with career implications earlier than ever before. The desire to increase students’ opportunities to gain relevant work experience was one reason the Wisconsin School of Business moved from junior to sophomore admissions this fall. But even before the change, multiple internships were already becoming more common at the undergraduate level. A good example: Mark McFarland, a Finance, Investment, and Banking major, who is set to graduate this May. The summer following his sophomore year, McFarland was a risk-consulting intern for Marsh, a leading risk broker and advisor based in Dublin, Ireland. During his junior year, he interned with Merrill Lynch Private Wealth Management in Madison. And the summer following his junior year, he interned with Edward Jones in its corporate offices in St. Louis, Mo. McFarland says having multiple internships helped fine tune his communication skills. “I not only learned how to effectively communicate with co-workers, but how to display the professionalism of a financial services firm while interacting with clients on a daily basis.” In some fields, internships are moving from paid to unpaid due to the state of the economy. Unpaid internships may be able to attract good candidates in very high-demand fields, but in most business fields paid internships remain the norm. “We haven’t seen an increase in unpaid internships,” says Schroeder. “There are certainly some unpaid internships out there, but the vast majority of companies who recruit with us offer paid internships. They need to, in order to remain competitive.” Students may think companies are in the driver’s seat when it comes to internships, but it’s actually a two-way street, according to Bruce Ellig, BBA ‘59, MBA ‘60, former head of human resources at Pfizer and author of several books on compensation. “Interns come back to school at the end of the summer and they talk about their experience. If they
say, ‘Boy, what a big waste of time that was— I counted paper clips most of the time,’ word gets out that it’s not a good company to work for,” he says. “If companies want to attract the best and brightest with their internship program, they need to do it well or not do it.” What It Means For some companies, internships are an afterthought. But done right, they can play an important role in helping firms construct an optimal workforce. A good example of a major employer that has incorporated a highly structured internship program into its hiring process is GE, which typically recruits at Wisconsin each year for both MBAs and undergraduates. Traci Diciaula, who recruits for GE, says the company has found its internship program to be, “a tremendous pipeline for full-time hires and future leaders. It’s a great way for both the company and the candidate to feel confident in their choice. Interns have a fresh, cutting-edge perspective on tough business challenges.” Similarly, while some students may view their internship as just another notch on their résumé, it can be much more. It can be a way to explore a company or an industry. To uncover what they really enjoy doing. To learn how to lead and how to be part of a team. It can be a chance to spread their wings and put what they’ve learned in the classroom into practice. “The value of any internship is what you make of it,” says Stephanie Lenz, an MBA student in real estate, who interned this summer with Hovde Properties. Lentz says she would tell incoming students to, “treat your internship as an opportunity not just to expand your experience, but to produce focused, thorough work incorporating the skills acquired in your first year,” she says. “If you approach any internship with the right attitude, you can ensure the experience will be successful for you and your employer.” Lari Fanlund is the editor of UPDATE.
decisions with career implications earlier than ever before.
Undergrad CLOSE UPS Managing Risk in Princeton Kristine May Bataclan, a double major in Actuarial Science and Risk Management and Insurance, spent the summer of 2008 with Munich Re America in Princeton, N.J. She worked on improving the historical profitability tool, one of the many reporting models in the firm’s Business Information Solutions (BIS) division. She also developed a new methodology for allocating expenses within Insurance Company Operations (ICO).
Financial Analysis in Golden Valley Lisa Koth, an undergraduate majoring in Finance, Investment and Banking, began her finance career this past summer in a financial analyst internship with General Mills in Golden Valley, Minn. Koth created three interactive Excel profitability models for the company’s “Brands on the Go” division that were used to assess operator and channel profitability and help longterm planning.
Interning Around the World Ben Hesprich, a Management and Human Resource major, spent summer 2009 interning with Save the Children in India—his third international internship. Previously, he interned in Portugal with the life science research firm, Promega, and with the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. In India, he worked with Save the Children to design quality standards for primary schools. Hesprich has passed his Foreign Service exam for a full-time position following his December 2009 graduation.
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I learned how to become a true self starter, going from knowing very little about educationrelated issues in India to knowing enough to help shape standards of quality that can be used in schools across the country. I used to look at companies asking for technical expertise and automatically disqualify myself, but I think if you can prove you’re a fast, capable learner, you are in a good position.
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Make Internships Pay Off for Your Organization
Students are having to make internship
— Ben Hesprich
UPDATE Fall/Winter 2009
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