Author: Nathan Parcells

Externship vs. Internship

Fall, winter, spring, and summer can all be referred to when discussing the duration of an internship, but, what about an externship? The only proper way to answer this question is with an ambiguous statement of “well, it depends.”

What is an Externship?

The simplest externship definition is to job shadow an individual, typically a respected professional within an industry or workplace a student has interest in pursuing. Externships are typically held for short time period lasting anywhere from a single day to eight weeks and are often held over a student’s winter or spring break whereas internships tend to be eight weeks long at minimum.

Differences between Externships and Internships

The other major difference between externships and internships are that externships typically are unpaid and the student usually doesn’t receive school credit for their experience. Even though the student is directly in the workplace, they’re still only shadowing the professional or group of professionals rather than having work delegated and projects assigned, such as one would have in an internship. The top aspect to remember when deciphering the difference of an externship versus an internship is that externships are used mainly to explore interests and curiosities whereas internships act as the bridge from student life to professional life.

For example, a finance student desperate for real world experience within the industry would most likely hold a fall or summer finance internship for a well known finance company such as Sequoia Capital. On the other side, a finance student who only had a single week free in summer might hold an externship with the CFO of Kiva, still gaining valuable experience but holding it for a shorter duration and mainly for observational purposes.

How to get an Externship?

But wait, how would a student land an externship with a CFO you ask? This can be answered with the use of a single tool – professional networking. A student should spend time harnessing powerful tools available such as browsing connections on Linkedin, asking professors for introductions to past colleagues, or watching campus guest speakers and meeting them once their presentation is over. Networking is often overlooked, so tap into it and land your next externship.

In the end, both externships and internships are extremely beneficial for a student of any major. The trick is proper time management to know which is the best fit, at the given time.

5 Ways to Manage Your Workload This Summer

Have you ever heard the expression, “Make sure you keep all your balls in the air!” You’re going to be juggling a lot of tasks during your summer internship. While having a lot of assignments on your plate may be stressful, it’s also an indicator that your manager and co-workers have faith in you to get a lot done. You’ll be a stronger intern when you carry more of the company’s weight, so here are 5 tips on how to manage your workload.

1. Make a list.

  • At the end of each day, write down all the assignments you hope to complete the following day.
  • Write down the meetings and events scheduled for the week.
  • Organize the day’s assignments from most important to least important going down the page so you complete the most important tasks first.
  • Estimate how long it will take for each assignment so that you will know how to divide up your time throughout the day.
  • Write down the week’s goals and assignments, and make sure you’re on pace to finish them by the end of the week.

There’s nothing more satisfying than checking off the assignments on your list as you go through the day.  Wunderlist, Things (for Mac), and OmniFocus (also for Mac) are useful task-management tools.

2. Discuss your schedule with your manager.

Ask your manager which assignments are most important to the company. Get advice from your manager on how to balance your time.  Express that you want everything you produce to be excellent.

3. Strive for quality over quantity.

At the end of your summer internship, your co-workers are going to remember the few extraordinary projects you blew out of the water, not the high number of tasks you completed.

4. Stretch your capabilities.

As long as you’re doing quality work, challenge yourself to see how much you can be responsible for during your summer internship. Your enthusiasm to take on more assignments will impress your manager and encourage your co-workers.

5. Get to work early.

A recent study posted on the Harvard Business Review showed that university students are more productive and confident when they get up early. The majority of jobs work on a 9-5 schedule, so it will benefit you to be accustomed to the morning routine. If you arrive early and stay late, your manager will be more understanding if you can’t complete all your assignments.

Ask yourself this week:

  • “What is one thing I could spend less time doing to make my day more productive?”
  • “What is one thing I can start working on tomorrow morning before the rush of the day begins?”
  • “Where in my work am I striving for quantity over quality instead of the other way around?”

Want to find out more about National Intern Day and how you can win a cash prize? Head over to nationalinternday.com to get the scoop.

10 Tips On Setting Goals With Your Manager

You’ll have more success arriving at your desired destination if you have a map in your hand. In the same way, having your manager’s guidance will greatly benefit you this summer. Once you set goals with your manager, you’ll have an exact description of what’s required of you and what you’ll be expected to achieve during your summer internship. Knowing what’s expected of you is empowering, so here are 10 tips on how to set realistic goals with your manager.

1) Be flexible when you set up a time to meet with them. Managers are probably going to have to take time out of their busy schedule to meet with you. However, your manager will appreciate how you had the impetus to set up a meeting.

2) Prepare for the meeting by outlining your personal goals beforehand. Know these goals well and be ready to explain why each one is valuable. Also, write a list of questions you’d like to ask your manager.

3) Be enthusiastic and open the meeting with friendly conversation.  You will both enjoy the meeting more if you walk into it with a smile on your face.

4) Outline a schedule together that details when you will meet with your manager throughout the summer. Jointly create criteria for how and when you’ll be evaluated. Aim to meet with your manager at least once a week.

5) Discuss how your personal goals fit into the larger scope of the company. Tell your manager that you would appreciate receiving constructive feedback throughout the course of your summer internship on how you’re progressing towards fulfilling goals that relate to your role.

6) Ask for clarification on anything you don’t understand. Questions don’t make you look stupid; they make it obvious that you care about doing the job right. It’s always better to get clarification and know exactly what is expected of you than to guess how you should do the job. Working without direction makes messes that you and your manager will have to clean up; a waste of time for both of you.

7) Write down your goals for the week and other important points during the meeting. If you don’t copy down all that’s said, you’re bound to forget something.  It’s not your manager’s job to give you directions twice. Wielding a pen and pad will prove to your manager that details are important to you. Your notes will keep you on track when you are unsure of what you should be working on throughout the week.

8) Quantify your goals as much as possible and make the desired results metric-driven so your success can be easily measured. For instance, if your manager tells you, “Your evaluation will be based on how many projects you complete;” ask, “How many projects should I aim to complete this week?” When you have these numbers in front of you at your next evaluation, you will be able to say, “We said I should generate 5 leads this week, and I now have 15 leads who I have set up meetings with.”

9) Be honest with your manager. If you don’t agree with something your manager says or don’t understand why you need to perform an assignment in a certain way, respectfully bring it up to them. Burying concerns will only make them sprout up in ugly ways in the future.

10) Thank your manager at the end of the meeting. Reiterate your appreciation in an email or online message and point out specific pieces of their advice that were helpful to you.

“Under promise and over deliver.” If you exceed expectations in every detail of your work, your manager will trust you with more and set higher goals for you by the time you have your next meeting.

How to Accelerate Your Learning Curve During an Internship

“What in the world is that!?” I’m guessing you’ve already asked this question during your summer internship.  What makes an internship valuable is that immediately after you learn something new, you are thrown into hands-on experiences to test your knowledge.  After learning what a sales pitch is, you reach out to clients directly; after learning a new programming language, you write computer software according to that new information. The quicker you can become knowledgeable about what you’re working on, the more successful you’ll be. This article will show you how you can accelerate your learning curve.

1) When you collide with something you don’t understand, catch it before it slips away!

Write down that word or topic so you don’t forget it, and then start gathering information as soon as you can.

2) Learn for the sake of personal growth.

Even if what you’re learning about doesn’t relate to your specific job as a summer intern, you’ll still benefit by being knowledgeable about it. You could end up working in that particular field or you could use your knowledge to contribute to an important conversation.

3) Take advantage of all the resources available at your fingertips:

  • E-books: provide in-depth information.  Quora.com is a great resource, especially for tech students.
  • Forums: give you the street-knowledge of the topic
  • Magazines: are interactive and fun to read
  • Blogs: allow you to interact with a community of specialists.  For instance, if you want to learn more about SEO, http://www.seomoz.org/blog is great.

4) Approach the Experts.

Look for the people who are cited in the articles you read. Research them. Go to their blogs and homepages. Send them a brief but insightful email. They may form a relationship with you, which would benefit your entire company.

5) Start the Conversation.

Your colleagues should be glad to respond to any questions you have.  If they don’t know the answer, then you have just created an opportunity for them to learn alongside you. Use Twitter and Facebook to post questions.  When you spark an online discussion, you never know what knowledge could be shared or who could join the discussion.

There is a gap between being familiar with a topic and being a master of it. You can bridge that gap by purposefully acting to accelerate your learning curve throughout your summer internship.

Want to find out more about National Intern Day and how you can win a cash prize? Head over to nationalinternday.com to get the scoop.

How to Set Internship Goals

So, you’ve landed a summer internship. Congratulations! As you know, internships are extraordinary opportunities to learn and grow. However, internships can only be what YOU make of them. In order to make the most of your experience, you need to set some solid goals.

Finding Your Passion & Setting Goals

Passion grows when you pursue a goal. You play with passion because you want to win, you write with passion because you want to convey, and you will work with passion because you want to succeed. “There is no passion to be found in playing small.”-Nelson Mandela

The first step to charting out how you want your internship to run its course is to look back and remember how you arrived where you are. Reflect on why you wanted to intern at the company you’re now at. How did you think the experience would serve you? Why did the idea of working there excite you? It will be important to re-ignite the spark of passion that led you to the internship as assignments are poured on you during your first days as an intern. Passion is the most direct way to your success.

Setting Successful Goals for your Summer Internship

Setting goals as an intern requires that you define success. What do you want to accomplish by the end of the summer? Some examples of this could be leading a project of your own, making a connection with another company, or receiving a job offer.

Remember to make your goals measurable. Specific numbers should be incorporated in your goals. For example, you want to prepare and present 7 fifteen-minute presentations to your manager and co-workers by the end of the summer.

Break your goal down into a more organized schedule: ex. you want to complete a presentation every week for this month.

Write your goals down. This will enable you to look back on them occasionally and check to see how you’re progressing. If one of your goals is to become an effective networker, continually develop that goal by meeting with people on a weekly basis.

Make goals that you believe you can meet. However, (and this part is crucial) once you reach the first set of goals you create, create new ones! Allow yourself to be satisfied with the accomplishment of a goal, but continue to look ahead. A marathon runner doesn’t stop to celebrate at each mile-marker.

Exceeding Expectations

No matter what industry you’re in, you should always strive not only to meet the expectations of your role but to exceed them.

The key to exceeding expectations is to take extra steps in each of your individual projects. When you finish a piece of writing, reread it several times and replace mediocre words for shimmering ones. When you finish meeting with someone, shoot them an email or Facebook message thanking them for their time. When you finish all your assignments for the day, help others fulfill theirs; I guarantee they won’t forget it. There is always more to be done. Continually be alert and search for what more you can do.

Come into your work with passion, set to exceed the clear goals you laid out for yourself.  If you keep your goals in front of you as you strive to be productive in the workplace, you will be surprised how much you will achieve. Don’t be satisfied with just a base hit; strive to hit the ball out of the park. If you do so, you will be well on your way to Mastering Summer Internships.

Want to find out more about National Intern Day and how you can win a cash prize? Head over to nationalinternday.com to get the scoop.

As You Graduate Find Companions and Find Adventure

Your career is a lot like an adventure. There are going to be times when things are slow and tedious, but there will also be major decision points that take you to new and unexpected places.

Like in every great adventure, whether it’s Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings, the people you surround yourself will play an enormous role in how far you get and how successful you are along the way, so as seniors getting ready to graduate, you should ask yourself, who do I want to team up with to help me grow and take on this next stage of my life?

Here are 3 reasons why, as you graduate, you should look first for WHO you are working with, rather than where or for how much.

1. “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

This quote by Jim Rohn is powerful and true. There will be few people more influential in your life than your first boss and your first co-workers (each of whom you will spend 8 hours or more a day with). At your company you could have a boss like Gandalf, who entrusts Frodo with the ring of power, knowing that he has the ability to grow into this role, even if he doesn’t know it himself, or you could end up with a boss who is a micro-manager who always tells you explicitly what to do and never challenges you—cutting your growth off at the knees.

Outside of your boss, you will find that some co-workers give you honest feedback. I remember when my friend and co-founder told me that I needed to get better at selling my ideas internally and taking the time to map out new process changes. It hurt to discover that I was doing things the wrong way, but if I hadn’t heard this, I never would have improved. Well communicated feedback leads to growth acceleration and is infinitely more effective when coming from co-workers who you trust and respect.

2. Work should be challenging, but fun.

When Harry Potter is preparing for the Tri-Wizard Tournament, he, Hermione and Ron start putting in insane hours at the library. They are toiling hard, but their friendship makes it so that the hours are still enjoyable. Ultimately, their strength as a team allows them to come up with creative solutions.

The same thing will happen at your work. If you are working at a company you love, there will be days you put in long hours because you want to create the best end result. If you are surrounded by co-workers and friends you enjoy, these hours will be full of jokes, creative ideas and won’t truly feel like work, even as you make progress towards a great end result.

3. You will be empowered.

In the end, finding co-workers who understand and support you will make you more successful. I remember when my co-founder and I were trying to get a friend to quit a prestigious job, take a $50,000 pay cut and come join us, working out of a home office on a product that didn’t exist yet. We were just out college, inexperienced and had no right to ask someone to do this, but we believed in each other. We decided that with this person’s help, Looksharp would grow to be a fantastic platform and success. What might have felt uncomfortable otherwise clearly became the right choice–we made the job offer and our third co-founder, to our surprise, accepted and joined our team.

Over the course of a career, you will look back at a number of situations just like the one above, where you decided to do something different or risky, because you had the support of your colleagues, and that it made all the difference in where you ended up.

So what’s the point?

Pick a job based on the people. If you like your co-workers and boss at a particular company, be very cautious about leaving—these things are rare and more important than you might know.

Lastly, how do you know if a given company is right for you? It takes time to learn who your boss and co-workers might be. Some questions you can ask during an interview include:

Where have other people who have accepted jobs here gone on to work?

What skills will I learn while working here?

What is your management style?

Do co-workers spend time with one another outside of work?

Another way to go is to ask yourself if you were stuck at the airport with your team, are these people you’d enjoy getting a beer with or not? If not, will you truly enjoy working with them for the next 3+ years of your life?

And the winner is…

The Looksharp Blog competition results are in and with so many fantastic submissions, selecting just one winner was extremely hard. Our panel of experts evaluated each post and while every submission was compelling, Hanna Martin, our grand prize winner, stood out for her post “Oxford Commas and Siam Chicken.”

If you haven’t read the post yet we highly recommend you do so now. It begins with a humorous observation (who knew that an editorial internship came with so much food!), but quickly begins to reveal insights into how the internship position helped Hanna discover a passion for writing, understand how her unique perspective as a millennial made her an asset, and how she advanced her role from basic editing work to ultimately getting a full page write up in the Spokane Coeur d’Alene Living. And while Hanna’s employer may not have embraced the Oxford Comma, we certainly do, so with each job comes different office cultures, brand guidelines, and more.

The Winner:

Oxford Commas and Siam Crispy Chicken by Hanna Martin

Congratulations Hanna on your fantastic post!

Runner Ups:

3 Things I Learned Interning at Tommy Hilfiger in Amsterdam by Alice Fennelly

This post had everything we look for in a great blog article. Starting with the palpable nervous excitement of receiving a job offer… on the other side of the globe and leading into some truly sage advice on how to be both ambitious, but realistic with your workload while at an internship. Kudos Alice on translating so much internship insight into such a succinct and digestible piece.

Speaking Up and Pushing My Comfort Zone with an Internship at MTV by Emily Tantuccio

Emily sums up her blog post with “MTV taught me that being young doesn’t mean you can’t make an impact – and that it’s always worth it to push yourself outside of your limits.” We couldn’t agree more. Don’t sell yourself short at the beginning of your career, if you take this advice now, you’ll find there are very few limits to what you can do with your career.

Honorable Mentions:

Hard Lessons Learned From My Internship Behind Bars by Meredith Ten Eick

While many students set their sights on an internship or job at a brand name company, Meredith shows that what’s most important is to find a job you are truly passionate about. From building her own internship from scratch to overcoming challenges during the job, Meredith struggles but ultimately finds lifelong lessons through the process of helping inmates at a maximum security prison.

How to Seize Unexpected Opportunities and Make the Most of Your Internship by Viru Agrawal

When opportunity knocks are you ready to grab it? Viru explains how his summer plans got turned on their head with a last minute offer to a globally renowned electric power company. He jumps at the opportunity and then makes the most of the experience, sharing the huge amount of internship advice he learned along the way.

Other Fantastic Posts:

As we mentioned at the onset of this post, every student blog that was submitted and accepted into the competition were wonderfully written and contained valuable insight. Just because these are the posts that stood out to our team doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read all the entries submitted onto our blog here. Other posts include what it’s like to intern at a non-profit, at a startup, in media and at news organizations. Be sure to browse the full list of posts and read those that relate to your field and interests!

See the Full List!

What 50,000 Students Have to Say About College Recruiting

What are the best tools for finding internships and jobs? How long does it take for the average  student to find full-time employment after graduation? What are the expected and actual salary levels for every major? What cities/industries do students want to work in?

We are thrilled to share the answers to these questions and many more in WayUp’s 2015 State of College Hiring Report. We run this report every year, and each year, it grows in size and scope. This year, the survey got over 50,000 respondents, making it the largest student job seeker survey of all time!

First and foremost, we wanted to thank all the students who took time to answer our questions. We share the results with as many employers as possible with the goal of creating positive change in the way companies think about hiring and engaging millennials.

The results in the report are fascinating and point to major trends regarding how students are learning new skills (with online courses), what tools they use to find work (Google and other search engines) and what they look for in positions (opportunities to grow and companies with a diverse team and culture). There is too much to go over in one blog post, so we will be doing a series of posts in various channels to help bring to light the biggest takeaways from the report.

Those interested in downloading the full report can do so here.

Below a few of the biggest takeaways we wanted to highlight in this first post:

1.  Over 50% of the class of 2014 remains unemployed or underemployed!

Our survey found that only 45.4% of the class of 2014 is currently enrolled in a full-time job meaning that 54.6% of grads from last year are unemployed or underemployed (this is excluding students enrolled in graduate education). 17.9% of grads are employed part-time, 9.6% are working in the services industry, 7% are continuing to take internships and a seriously high, 16.6% of 2014 grads are fully unemployed as of the time of this survey.

While the US has seen job growth over the past year, the job market for recent grads is incredibly challenging. Our report demonstrates that students who have done multiple internships, who have completed paid internships, who have taken online courses in addition to school work and who have high GPAs all fair much better than their peers.

2. STEM fields lead the charge for highest expected salaries.

Our research found that computer science students (particularly those with high GPAs) on average expected the highest salaries of all students. Even more interesting, is that even with these high expectations, these students were undervaluing their worth on the market with many employers paying well above these expected ranges and a number of leading software engineers getting paid over $100k starting salary right out of school.

On the other end of the spectrum, English, social service and arts majors expect the lowest starting salaries, along with graphic design students. Graphic design is an interesting case, where many designers get paid well, but due to the increase in number of students studying graphic designer (many through large national art schools), the competition for internships/jobs is so high that many students take little to no intern pay at all in order to get a foot in the door.

3.  Women expect significantly lower intern salaries than men.

Women on average expect a starting salary that is $3.00 lower than men, roughly 25% lower. There is a large conversation taking place around the wage gap between men and women, and it is interesting to find that even within a first ever job, women are expecting lower salaries. Given that future salaries are often pegged to prior salaries, this creates longterm discrepancies for women.

Also, based on our recent negotiation study with NerdWallet, we found that women are also much less likely to try to negotiate salary.

Companies should look to ensure that all parties are paid fair internship and entry-level salaries, and all students need to learn how to negotiate and ask for a fair wage.

To download the full report click the button below.

Marketing Deep Dive with Paul Willard

paul willardView livestream here.

Calling all marketers, growth hackers, entrepreneurs and techies. Join us for a free online career event with Paul Willard (@webgeek_).

Paul is one of the pioneers of ‘agile marketing’ (also known as growth hacking or data-driven marketing). He has been the CMO of three different companies now valued over a billion dollars (Coupons.com, Atlassian, and Practice Fusion) and is a partner at Subtraction Capital a top VC firm in the Bay Area.

The conversation will cover:

-What is data-driven marketing and how is it different from other marketing approaches?

-What are some core skills every marketing student should learn and how can you learn these while in school?

-What are the top marketing channels used by successful companies today?

-Other marketing hacks that help companies grow fast.

This is a virtual event and will be live streamed on the Looksharp blog May 19th at 11 am.

The live audience will be limited to 500 students on a first come first serve basis—to save your seat click here.

We’re live! View the video here.

5 Must Learn Career Lessons from Game of Thrones

It’s begun. The Sunday ritual of sitting on the edge of your couch, hoping that your favorite character doesn’t have their head taken off… or worse. Game of Thrones (GoT) is about as close to mindless fun as you can get, but any character who has survived more than two seasons has plenty to offer in terms of life/career advice.

We pulled together the best career lessons you can take away from characters ranging from Arya to the Red Viper. Enjoy!

(Warning there are some spoilers in here from seasons 1-3, none from season 4).

Be Comfortable with Unlikely Alliances:

One of the most interesting partnerships in Season 3 of GoT is between Arya and the Hound. While the partnership doesn’t end perfectly, the duo does manage to work together for a while with surprising results.

In the workplace, one of the most valuable skills you can develop is an ability to work with people with different skills and backgrounds. An engineer and a marketer might solve the same problem in entirely different ways. Learn to ask questions rather than push ideas, know your strengths and weaknesses and put in the time to help others achieve their goals so that they will help you achieve yours.

Don’t Celebrate Before it is Over:

Whether you’re the Red Viper trying to exact revenge on The Mountain, or an intrepid job seeker looking to get hired at your favorite company, success is a marathon, not a sprint. The key to winning a marathon is to keep calm and focused all the way through the finish line.

In the case of job seeking, just because you had a great interview and think you are a shoe in for a role, don’t get cocky. Follow-up with everyone who interviewed you, using well-written and professional emails or thank you cards.

Your Reputation Matters:

Everyone knows the Lannisters pay their debts. This is the family’s brand and it helps them wield power and it helps individual family members get out of sticky situations. This is a reputation the Lannisters have built for years and one that requires careful maintenance. The second they stop paying their debts, no one will trust them again.

Likewise, when you begin your internship you want to build the right professional reputation. If you commit to completing a project by a certain time, you need to do that, or at the very least let a project manager know if you are not going to meet a deadline. You want to be known as the employee who “always delivers on what they promise,” just like the Lannisters.

Planning is Good, But Be Ready for Change:

In GoT, you never know what will happen next. The second you think that Joffrey and the Lanisters are the nemesis; you get introduced to Melisandre, the Red Woman, and the White Walkers. In your career, you should do your best to plan ahead, bring a positive attitude and result to the work you do, but remember that many career breaks come from unexpected places.

In our  piece from Jason Portnoy, former CFO at Practice Fusion and Coupons.com and current Subtraction Capital Partner, he was working hard in Stanford’s graduate school, when he was encouraged to drop out of school by a not so well known entrepreneur at the time named Peter Thiel. Set yourself on the course for success but be mentally prepared to make a big change when your intuition tells you it’s the right time.

And if all else fails…

Get dragons. It’s the only surefire (see what we did there) way to get what you want 100% of the time.

Happy GoT Season 5 watching and happy (internship/job) hunting!

dragon