Summer is coming to an end and your internship is nearly over. How the time flies! However, hark work doesn’t stop on your last day. There are still things you should be doing even after your internship is done to ensure that you are on your way to career success.
Here are three things you should be doing to capitalize on your internship experience:
1. Cultivate Your Network
It is vitally important to keep in touch with the people you’ve met and to cultivate these relationships. Hopefully, you’ve been building a network of people at the place you’ve worked and in various levels of the organization. Whether on your team or in other places, these individuals add value to your network in small and big ways. Some people are future mentors. Others may be able to recommend you for new opportunities. Over time, knowing who’s who in the organization will become a key asset to you.
Even more importantly, if you have done a decent job as a team mate, your coworker will probably want to know how you are doing throughout the year. Take time to reach out and share short status updates with them. They will appreciate it and look forward to seeing you back on the team, should the opportunity arise.
2. Update Your Resume
It is astounding how many interns will fail to refresh their resume to include accomplishments they have made during their internship. I have made this mistake too many times myself. Waiting till you absolutely have to do it for your next job might mean going long enough that you forget the important details you should’ve included. Don’t make this mistake.
Thinking about your resume during and after your internship is important. You may need to get back in touch with your team to get specific metrics. Often, these metrics need time to be considered meaningful in a way that speaks to your impact. This is another reason why cultivating your network is so important. Your co-workers will be much more eager to help you get the stats and facts if they know that you are a genuine person. No one likes that somebody who only calls when they need something.
3. Build On Your Skills
Just because you’ve learned new skills at an organization during your internship doesn’t mean that it’s the only place to build them. You can probably do something throughout the year to enhance or practice your skills.
As a student, you can take college courses related to the project experience you gained while working. You can start up a personal project that employs some of the same tooling or their equivalents (perhaps in open source). Perhaps you can give a presentation to fellow students or to a campus club about something interesting you learned. However you choose to do it, the most important thing is to do it.