How to Survive and Prevent a Bad Internship

There’s a good chance that you’ve had a bad internship or job experience. Maybe it was mundane tasks, unfriendly co-workers, or damaged expectations that did you in. Many MLS/MLIS programs require, or at least strongly recommend, an internship or practicum before graduation. Internships are great ways to taste-test a type of librarianship, network, and get practical experience. The unfortunate reality is that we don’t always know what we’re walking into when we begin an internship. So, how do we survive or prevent a bad internship?

Alternative title: How to avoid looking like this.

Survival
If you’re already going through a bad internship experience or find yourself in one later, you’ll need to know how to surive. Take a deep breath, remind yourself it is an opportunity to learn that will only last a few months, and use the following tips to better your internship experience.

Two weeks left to apply for the EveryLibrary / HLS Summer 2013 Internship!

Don’t forget, there are just two weeks left to apply for the paid Hack Library School/EveryLibrary advocacy internship! In case you missed our last post on the internship, here are the details again!

Without further ado:

EveryLibrary / Hack Library School Internship 

The EveryLibrary / Hack Library School internship will provide a current MLS/MLIS student with the opportunity to apply their specialized knowledge and skills to public policy and voter advocacy issues confronting independent library districts. One selected student will work over a 10 – 12 week period during summer 2013 to produce original research or a white-paper length policy brief for later publication. Work produced during this internship will be under a Creative Commons license and made available to the public via Hack Library School.

The intern will be supported with a $500.00 stipend and is encouraged to conduct self-guided, hands-on, research-oriented work at agencies, advocacy groups, corporations, and legislative and executive offices. The intern will work in close collaboration with EveryLibrary on the success of this project.  No provision is made for other support.

Apply Yourself

When I tell people what I am doing in Florence, Italy for a year, I am invariably asked one question: “How did you land such a position?!” To which I smile broadly, often chuckle a little and answer simply and honestly: “I applied.” This, my LIS, MLIS and MSIT friends is one of my best hacks for library school and life.

“Library Automation 6″ by quisnovus via Flickr under CC.

“80% of success is showing up.” – Woody Allen

You have to show up. For most positions and roles that you want to land, that means tossing your hat in the ring with an application.

If you have been following HLS’s new series “So What Do You Do?” you have heard about a number of great internships and programs to round out your LIS education. In none of them (at least so far) does the hacker say: well I was just standing around on a street corner and someone said “come do this thing.” Whether it be getting into library school, volunteering, taking a leadership position in the club which eventually leads to the internship which then leads to a job with your dream organization… all the steps start with some sort of applying yourself — even if it is as simple as showing up.

[Series] So What Do You Do? Transportation Research Center Library Internship

Bergkamp M1 micro surfacing paver and mobile support unit

This post is part of a new series called “So What Do You Do?” in which LIS students talk about their experiences as interns. We want to showcase the wide range of things people are doing in the world of library and information science.

Tell us a bit about yourself.

My name is Paul Lai, and I am a second-year library science student with interests in scholarly communications and academic libraries. I applied for this internship at a transportation research center because I am interested in working as a librarian in a university research center or as an embedded librarian in another academic context. I have also previously interned at a small academic library doing general reference and circulation work as well as at a large public library’s preservation department helping research availability of older books and creating polyester sleeves for early twentieth-century American sheet music.

So what do you do?

I am the library intern at the Center for Transportation Studies (CTS) at the University of Minnesota. CTS is an active research center that manages faculty and Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) research projects. CTS publishes technical reports for this research along with other transportation-related materials for both the research and practitioner communities. I work primarily with the publications team to make materials available and findable online as well as with ready reference questions and more in-depth literature search help. The center does not have a physical library space (aside from a couple of bookcases at the end of a hallway), but it does have an extensive list of resources on its Library Services page.

EveryLibrary / Hack Library School Summer 2013 Internship

Last week, we announced our new collaboration with Hiring Librarians. This week, we are delighted to announce yet another collaboration, this time with EveryLibrary, a library advocacy nonprofit that we wrote about last September. The premise of our collaboration with EveryLibrary is simple, and potentially incredibly fun for you: Together, we would like to sponsor a paid intern for summer 2013!

Without further ado, the details: