Things An Intern Should Take Home With Her

(And no, I'm not talking about office supplies).

The summer intern season is rapidly winding up, and across the country thousands of students and recent graduates are firing up word processing programs to add a new What I Did Over My Summer Anti-Vacation entry to their resumes. And that's exactly right, but updating your resume is the bare minimum. To maximize the professional value of your internship, you should not walk out of the office on your last day without also securing the following:

A work sample. Depending on the nature of your internship, this may be a design mock up, a video or sound clip, a writing sample, or press clippings about an event you organized. Use your judgment; be sure to ask your supervisor's permission before using anything that might contain confidential or restricted information, or submit an edited version that removed any touchy stuff for your supervisor's approval. For example, I would not want my interns to use memos they wrote for me as is, because they frequently identify clients by name or contain other information protected under attorney-client privilege. But those memos are frequently easy to bowlderize by removing the client's name and making some of the conclusions hypothetical rather than specific (Courts have recognized X as a pure defense to this claim. To make out a prima facie defense, Client would need to prove the following... rather than The facts of this case demonstrate that RadBusiness can make out a defense of X for the following reasons...)

A recommendation. Tap these people to recommend you for future positions, friend them on LinkedIn, ask them if they would recommend your work on that site.

An idea. For a research topic, for a business, for a blog post, for streamlining your own work practices. One idea is good, but three is better, and five is better still. Part of this is self serving, because it's always a good idea to think about how you can leverage your past work experience into new opportunities. But another part of this is about habit development. Thinking critically about your professional life as a story that you are writing rather than as a list of tasks others assign you to do is a choice, and one that you ought be making over and over again without thinking of it.

E-mail addresses of the people doing the most interesting work, and with whom you worked most cloesly. These are people you'll want to be able to check in with periodically as mentors or more casual advisors. And of course you'll need to know where to send your thank you note at the end of the summer.

Note that this list does not include "A Job Offer." You might want one, you might not. Internships and entry level jobs are about getting experience, making connections, and trying out new skills first, and only second about long-term employment. An internship has been a great success if you learn that you would rather eat glass than working in PR.