Turn Your Internship into a Job

In terms of getting and keeping your dream job, I’m definitely fortunate. I was hired at a magazine company in my early 20s and in just over a year became its top editor. My interns ask me frequently for advice about landing a similar situation. The simple answer is that I was in the right place at the right time and had enough luck and energy to stick it out… which isn’t much help to them. The more complex answer is that I took a small opportunity – as an unpaid, undergraduate intern – and managed to turn that into a career. Here’s how I did it.

Unabashed enthusiasm. When I started interning, my company was small, and the staff was still trying to work out a lot of bumps – like the fact that the whole sales and editorial staff shared two computers. But the pure excitement of working at a magazine, any magazine, carried me through all of that. I once went to cover what my editor thought would be a short article about a summer education program; I got so excited about the people I met there and the work they were doing that I came back to the office with enough information for a long feature, which my editor then asked me to turn into a cover story. That level of enthusiasm, from an intern, is very impressive to a potential employer.

Extra effort. Being accident prone (that’s a story for another day), I broke my foot and ended up on crutches a couple of weeks into my summer internship. But, I wanted to be in that office so badly that it didn’t even occur to me to call out. Some interns would cancel an entire internship, or at least stay home for a week or two, for what turned out to be a minor inconvenience. The fact that I stuck it out showed my editor how committed I was to learning and working at the company.

Staying in touch. My editor liked my work (and my work ethic) so much that she allowed me to write a handful of articles after I went back to college. Because I kept asking for more, she eventually gave me a column, and I would sometimes just stop in the office when I was home to say hello. I maintained a good relationship with her for two years of freelance writing – so when the job opened up (for an office assistant) and I expressed interest, my resume went to the top of the pile.