What do interns want? I feel like this question is rarely asked within companies (except for 10Fold of course – they practically force this answer out of you) In fact, ‘what do you want out of me?’ seems to be the real question.
I went into the real world with that mentality: what can I do for you? What do you need out of me? How can I be better? Being so fresh in any industry is scary. You can prepare yourself all you want, but until you have real-life scenarios in front of you, it’s not the same.
What do we want?
We want a company who wants to invest in us. We want a boss and people around us to want us there, we don’t want to feel like we’re bothering anyone or not learning. The whole point of interning is to be a sponge, to learn as much as we can so we can determine if this is the career for us. If we can actually do this and do it well. No intern wants to go into a job, and leave feeling useless or unwanted. We want a company to show us the ins and outs and make sure we’re getting as much out of them as they’re getting out of us. It needs to be a two-way street of investment.
We want to grow
Whether that’s with the company or apart from the company. No intern wants to wake up every day and realize this career wasn’t for them, or that person, for that matter. We want to be that generation who loves going to work every day, so much so that we wouldn’t mind coming in on the weekends (don’t quote me). Growing with our company would be the ultimate goal, however, because we really do not want to waste our time or yours. 51% of interns want the full-time offer letter.
We want real work and real results
We want a chance to do real work, that’s meaningful and impactful. We don’t want to feel like we took that extra year of trigonometry, and will never use it again. We’ve already taken the unnecessary classes to get where we are now. We want work that is going to be helpful to us later. Things and knowledge we can actually share with the real world.
In the end, interns just want to be loved and trained; like a puppy. Take us for those walks, train us, love us and we promise to be good and make you proud.
Interested in the intern experience here at 10Fold? Learn more about the program and apply here.