Three Ways to Document Accomplishments at Your Summer Internship

by Alex Braun

#1: Make an internship journal

The way you perform at your summer internship is obviously crucial to your success, but you won’t realize the full value of your hard work if you can’t quickly and effectively summarize the experience to a future employer.

The best method to reaching that goal is to start logging some key pieces of information right now in an internship journal.

A good internship journal doesn’t need to include long written passages about what you did each day. What it should include are copies of a few key documents from each week to jog your memory about what tasks you worked on. But remember: Don’t include any material that shouldn’t leave the office, and don’t show the journal itself to other hirers. If you’re unsure of whether it’s OK to include something, just ask.

Your journal is all about retaining a clear understanding of what your duties were and how you’ve progressed. Often, it’s a lot easier to see patterns and growth in retrospect.

Here are some basic suggestions on how to organize your journal:

1. Put it in a binder.
2. Add a tabbed divider for every week.
3. Staple a Post-It summary of how you contributed to each task. Think of how you would describe your work in a tweet – 140 characters or less.
4. Include copies of any evaluation forms you receive. Some schools request weekly evaluations when an internship is done as part of an academic program or for credit. If your school doesn’t do that, ask your manager if the company has had any system in place for evaluating previous interns. These aren’t crucial, especially on a weekly basis, so don’t pester your employer too much if it becomes apparent it would be too much of a time burden. But they’re nice to have.

#2: Arrange times to discuss your progress

Approaching your internship manager for feedback can score you major points for taking your work seriously – even if your manager is too busy to set up regular check-ins. If your manager does have time, you should have brief, structured talks about what you’re doing well, where you could improve, and how far you have progressed in achieving several mutually-agreed upon goals for the program. (If you haven’t set these goals specifically yet, have that conversation ASAP.)

As with the evaluations forms, your manager might say he or she is too busy to check in every week. But spoken check-ins can still be valuable if they’re very brief, so let your manager know that you don’t need to schedule a formal meeting. Even a weekly email with three or four bullets points will give you insight that could drastically impact your performance.

#3: Ask for recommendations

Having one or two solid personal recommendations from an internship can be instrumental in building trust for future internships and jobs. But they can also be hard to obtain, because well-written recommendations require specific examples and thoughtful wording.

When choosing a writer, make sure it’s someone who’s familiar with your work. Yes, it can sound great to have an endorsement from the CEO, but if they’re not familiar with your duties and/or don’t know who you are, you might lose points for putting them in an awkward situation.

The two things you must give any recommendation writer are:

1. A very brief outline of what you consider to be your biggest accomplishments during the internship. If you’ve made an internship journal, just use the relevant “Post-It summaries.”
2. At least two weeks to complete the recommendation.

Remember to ask your writer to use the company letterhead at the top. Little details can go a long way.