Mind your p’s and q’s. There are many more ways to trip yourself up while on work experience than there are chances to impress.
Emily Ford
Work experience is a bit like puberty: painful but unavoidable. It’s not easy to prove yourself when you have no experience and no one trusts you to do anything interesting, but a successful internship can lead to CV points, contacts and even a job. Just don’t do what these poor souls did.
Make a bad impression before you start. Sonja Stockton, the head of graduate recruitment at PricewaterhouseCoopers, which recruits 1,200 students a year, has lost count of the interns-to-be who phone up expecting a personal service. “They call and say ‘Hi, it’s Dave, I’m not sure what line of service I’m supposed to be in,’ They assume that I know who Dave is.” Some ask their parents to do the dirty work for them. “We get a lot of parents who ring us as secretaries. ‘My son’s travelling and he needs to return this information, etc.” In a word: unprofessional.
Phone friends from the office. Rajeev Syal, a former reporter for The Sunday Times, didn’t ask for feedback from an intern, but got it anyway. “On the second day [he] came in, put his feet up on the table, picked up the phone then started speaking in a very loud voice about how he was doing work experience for The Sunday Times and how it was really boring. He wasn’t given much to do after that.” Esther Oxenbury, the head of investment banking graduate recruitment at JP Morgan, has seen interns fall asleep at their desk. If you’re bored, don’t show it.
Forget to check important details. A reporter colleague says: “I had a friend who did work experience for an Australian newspaper and wrote a piece in which she quoted a well-known businessman whose name was Mr Burger. She had a brain freeze and in the article she quoted him as Mr Hamburger. Neither Mr Burger nor the editor saw the funny side and she was told never to come back to the paper.”
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Pass on confidential information. Alastair Lindsay, a founder of RateMyPlacement, an internship feedback website, was at the Bank of England, where a royal visitor, Prince William, was expected. An e-mail went round the bank alerting staff to the Prince’s arrival. Lindsay decided to gloat to friends at other companies about meeting the prince. “Unfortunately I missed the ‘confidential’ tag on the e-mail and it got flagged by the bank’s security system. I was handed an official warning, and probably labelled a threat to national security,” he says. Press ‘Reply All’ without thinking. A former intern at Jansen-Cilag, a pharmaceutical company, says: “A fellow placement student was arranging taxis for the Christmas party and e-mailed round asking for our addresses. I replied saying that I hoped I wouldn’t need a taxi because I planned to go back with her manager. When my colleagues started sniggering I realised I’d ‘replied all’ to the entire company.”
Assume that your boss shares your sense of humour. Chris Wickson, a fellow founder of RateMyPlacement, recalls: “I was on a placement during the Ashes series of 2006, and a few of us thought it would be funny to get Monty Panesar masks and wear them down to the canteen. A lot of people looked at us with alarm and we realised that to the noncricket fan our light-hearted banter could be taken the wrong way. We were told to take the masks off and given a stern talking to by our bosses.” Ignore a problem. “The whole PR industry is underpinned by work-experience people,” says Justin McKeown, a divisional director at Tri-media UK, a PR consultancy. They are a great help, he says – usually. An intern was asked to fax an important press release. “The next day I realised that it hadn’t been sent. He confessed that he was embarrassed that he didn’t know how to work the fax machine.” If you don’t know, ask.
Think the small jobs are beneath you. “A very important task is cutting out press coverage from newspapers,” McKeown says. One intern finished the job, then left. “When we came to have a look, she had stuck all the cuttings face down. She was quite clearly trying to say that she didn’t appreciate menial tasks.”
Get drunk when you’re trying to impress. Stockton has encountered several interns who spend too long in the bar then struggle to get up for induction the next morning. “I have to go down and say ‘You’re representing PricewaterhouseCoopers. This is not an extension of the student bar’,” she says.
