Internships 101: How to Survive Your Summer at the Agency
It's intern season, and if you're a veteran of the game it's time to help them out.
Suburban surface traffic is reduced, more kids are riding around the neighborhood on their bikes, and kids who look twelve but claim they are in their early 20s are making the subway unbearable. That’s right, it’s intern season in your major metropolitan area.
Internships have changed a lot since a lot of us middle managers were in the game. For one, the kids are typically paid and their hours are tracked - no more free labor all the time. Secondly, a lot of internships actually exist for the benefit of the intern, not the company, which is a refreshing approach to helping school the next generation of shareholder value creators.
Be a Sponge
I attended a panel recently of senior leaders and an intern raised their hand and asked a good question: “How do I know I am adding value?” The answers from the panel were about instant feedback and working with your manager to understand your impact on the team. Fair, but this newsletter disagrees.
Interns are not expected to add value to an account during their internship. Like a first year associate at a law firm, or an MBA associated at a bank, or a Supreme Court justice looking to combat corruption, interns are actually expected to be useless. And this is not a dig on the interns themselves.
Many of these young bright-eyed, bushy-tailed professional infants enter the door looking to join a team and contribute. It’s a fair approach for these overachievers, but this is not what an internship is for. Three months capped at 40 hours/week is not enough time to drive value on an agency account. Interns are there to extend their learning experience from the classroom to the open office plan. To expect an intern to go from learning at university, to being a professional for three months in a major metro, to back to learning at a university is akin to cognitive whiplash.
In fact, a lot of agencies don’t charge intern hours to the client. This isn’t out of the goodness of an agency finance team’s hearts; it’s because clients also know that interns won’t be adding a lot to the team in their short tenure. The value proposition flows one way: from agency to intern.
This is By Design
No one - not client, not agency - is expecting interns to add value. The internship program is there to help young people understand how agency life works and to get some real, day-to-day experience with a real-life agency team.
The days of interns going to get coffee for the team or doing ridiculous busywork are over (at least they should be.) Those tasks don’t sum to a learning experience and they are a waste of time and energy for both the intern and the team. It’s also a slap in the face for the development teams who put these internship programs together to make a good experience for the students.
(Pan to Camera 2 for a heartfelt, direct talk to the intern.) You are there to learn, mostly through exposure, observation, and osmosis. Sit in on as many meetings as you can, try to absorb as much from your interactions as you can. Ask questions, try to understand processes, and get a feel for what it’s like to work at the agency you’re lucky enough to intern at.
You should feel overwhelmed - if you don’t, you might not be getting the visibility into the agency world that you should at this level. It’s not supposed to make sense - it doesn’t make sense to us some of the time, so it definitely should not make sense to a wet-behind-the-ears rookie.
Be a Good Guest
Just as the agency and client should be good hosts to you and make sure you’re getting value our of your internship, you should also make sure you’re being a good guest to the agency and client.
There’s a lot of unwritten rules at agencies and they vary from place to place and holdco to holdco. Interns shouldn’t necessarily be subject to them, but they might find themselves inadvertently running afoul of them if they’re not paying close enough attention.
Keep an eye on who sits where - some people are open office plan nomads, others have set seats even if your agency is using the dreaded hot desking technique. Try to figure out who is who and avoid sitting in someone’s unofficial seat.
Agencies have typical start times and end times - unless interns have a set schedule, try not to stroll in at 10 if most of your team is there at 9, or leave at 4 if your team tends to stay late. Get a feel for the rhythm and try to match it (within your allotted hours.)
Keep in mind why you’re there. Some agencies use the internship program to gain favor with clients. If your dad/mom/uncle/aunt works at a major client of the agency you’re at, it’s likely not a coincidence that you’re there. It doesn’t mean you need to hide in a hole and apologize for your family’s success - nepo babies need jobs, too - but do keep it in mind in your day-to-day because you’re likely not the only person who made that connection.
Finally, do NOT hook up with anyone at your agency - intern or otherwise. While advertising may seem like a monolith from the outside, it’s a small industry at the end of the day and today’s hookup could be tomorrow’s colleague or rep or collaborator (or, if you really went above and beyond, boss.) Save yourself the potential embarrassment and look elsewhere.
Enjoy the City, Respectfully
Being a good guest extends to the metro area you find yourself in. Here in New York, intern season is punctuated by people riding the subway who very clearly have not made a habit of doing so.
If you’re using public transit, the rules are pretty standard across most major American cities. Take your backpack off on the train. Move in from the door after boarding the train so others can get on behind you. Let others off the train before bumrushing it. Watch your TikToks or whatever the new trend is with headphones on. Walk on the left side of the escalator - people have places to be. It is called public transit for a reason.
Take advantage of the city you’re in. If you’re completely new to it, explore what it has to offer. Go to museums and visit out-of-the-way neighborhoods. Take in a ballgame, even if it’s a minor league game (which can be more fun than the big leagues.) Try a local cuisine (unless you’re in Cincinnati.) You’re only young once, and if you decide agency life is for you after graduation, you’ll only have this much free time after work during your internship. Use it to its fullest potential.
Relax, You’ve Got This
You’re not going to get many opportunities to go to work, get paid a little bit, and have very low expectations. Don’t waste it. Again, you’re there to learn. The agency is not expecting anything of you from a value perspective.
All of this said, internship programs are ways that agencies identify promising talent. They don’t do this by looking at output or work product, but how you work on a team. If you make the typical mistakes that a newbie would make, but you show a willingness to learn from them and you’re good to work with, that will go a long way. Anyone expecting perfection or quality client-level output from interns on their own within three months is delusional and probably shouldn’t be managing them.
There’s a few check boxes you need to hit as an intern: show up on time, be somewhat professional as you learn the ropes of office life, approach projects earnestly and with a growth mindset, and don’t be a dick. There’s really not much more to it - you’ve got this.
Grab Bag Sections
WTF Juvenile Hydration: After a particularly long evening doing an insane amount of dishes, I stepped back to admire my work and noticed something peculiar about the array of spotless dishes before me.
Five water vessels for inside and two for outside. I only have two kids and do dishes throughout the day, so this is probably half a day’s worth of hydration accessories. And it got me thinking - I’m not sure I was ever asked as a child (until I began to play sports in earnest) if I was drinking enough water.
If you were thirsty you grabbed some water from the tap or the nearest water fountain. Bottled water was banned in our house - not because of the single use plastic aspect of them, they were just a “waste of money when it comes out of the tap for basically free.” Water bottles came into play, but again not until sports became a bigger part of the day. Water was a transient need, not something transported with you everywhere you happened to go.
But today, my wife or I cannot leave the house with one of the kids in tow without making sure they have their water bottle. My daughter’s had mini tantrums because we forgot her water bottle. My son will stop what he’s doing at random times during the day and simply yell “Want water!”
As much as I’d love to blame Big Water, the reality is as parents we do it to ourselves. We push water because we think drinking water is good and we want our kids to be healthy, and this is one way to do it. At least they’re hydrated.
Album of the Week: You’d be forgiven to think Chance the Rapper had a couple of decent songs and then fell off the face of the earth. The reality is that Chance had a couple of good mixtapes, and then fell off the face of the earth.
Acid Rap is Chance’s second mixtape, and one that was made - at least partly - under the influence of the CIA’s favorite drug. “Good Ass Intro” is, well, a good ass intro. Even if you can’t relate to “Cocoa Butter Kisses,” the features by Vic Mensa and Twista are unmissable - a good showing for the Chi. We do get a good Action Bronson feature on “Nana,” but it’s brought down by Chano’s attempt to match Bronsoliño’s freak, which is unrivaled. Towards the end of the tape, “Chain Smoker” has some excellent energy. All in all, a good showing by Chance (which made his precipitous fall-off all the more disappointing.)
Quote of the Week: “It's useless to play lullabies for those who cannot sleep.” - John Cage
See you next week!
“The rules are pretty standard across most major American cities. Take your backpack off on the train. Move in from the door after boarding the train so others can get on behind you. Let others off the train before bumrushing it. Watch your TikToks or whatever the new trend is with headphones on. Walk on the left side of the escalator - people have places to be. It is called public transit for a reason,” he shouted, at no one in particular, while standing in his front yard and staring directly into the sun. Later that night, while he inventoried the condiments in the refrigerator and checked expiration dates, he made a mental list of all the ways he could improve the efficiency of his local deli counter if only someone would put him in charge.