A graduate internship ought to be a pseudo job. It is an opportunity to discover whether you are suited to a particular discipline. It is only possible to capitalise on the opportunity, however, if you are assigned tasks during this internship that resemble those of contracted employees. Your presence isn't for someone else's benefit: your employers wouldn't have melted into a gelatinous mass of stress and breakdown by 5pm were it not for your appearance in the office. The internship is solely for you and you ought to get what you want from it.
This starts with your application. If you are applying online using a standard form, use the brief spaces for your own prose to emphasise what you want to learn; claim your own internship. Although it is difficult to avoid trite dictums about 'potential' and 'passion', detach from clich? and state concisely and coherently why you would be good at what you want to do. If you are applying by post with a covering letter and CV, use the same firm, lucid language to emphasise that you could do something for them. Establish a commanding persona; if you are selected, then this is whom they expect to meet and this will help you to affect a confidence in person that you may lack secretly.
If you are unsatisfied by your internship, don't spend days concealing your grimaces and swallowing vitriol, and evenings entering banal, plaintive statuses into Facebook silently willing a friend to comment so that you can begin a sorry chain of exchanged whinges and sympathy. Pipe up in the office: approach your assigned staff contact and emphasise, tactfully but firmly, that you think you are capable of something more demanding. If you photocopy all morning, and there is a tacit assumption that you will do the same all afternoon, preclude the realisation of this assumption by actually asking what you?????ll be doing that afternoon: urge them to find something more interesting. If you are inquisitive about your own position, it's less likely that someone will forget that you're there.
At its best, the internship can be a valuable field for preparation both in terms of contacts and experience, but this will only be possible if you ensure it. The intern is no one's priority, but your priority is to make use of your position, and so remind them of your presence and the skill set that you presented on your application. Do not be exploited nor settle for being underused.
Phoebe, GRB Journalist
