Owning Your Internship: The Workplace Cheat Sheet

By Natasha Gupta

After hours of scouring BroncoLink, tweaking your cover letter and making sure everything you've done seems important, you scored the coveted summer internship. Congratulations. Whether you will be blogging for a startup, crunching numbers at the Big Four or researching for a professor, you've shown the world you won't be spending July on the sofa drowning in Netflix (You'll wait until you're home at 5 p.m. like everyone else).

I've interned at a Fortune 500 company, a large financial services firm, a failed startup, a union of 20 coffee cooperatives in rural Nicaragua, two nongovernmental organizations and the California State Assembly.

Having worked in vastly diverse environments under every type of boss imaginable, I give you these basic fundamentals to owning any internship.

You're not above the coffee run

 You're right; how dare they ask you, a 20-year-old academic to waste your time, waking up early and driving to Starbucks for 10 grande caramel macchiatos. Suck it up. These people want to know they can throw the most mundane, borderline humiliating task at you and you'll do it with a smile on your face because that is how badly you want to work there. On the flip side, if it's been two weeks and you've done little else, talk to your supervisor about exploring more meaningful opportunities for growth.

Network, network and network some more

 This summer interning at Cisco Systems Inc., my lunch spending averaged $6 a day, five days a week, four weeks a month, and for three months. While the $270 spent on lunch alone stung, my spreadsheet will never reveal to you the intangible line item I call networking. Standing in line at an Indian buffet with your boss does more than just get you off work for an hour; it takes your relationship out of a working context and slices off a layer of tension, allowing you to share ideas and truly understand who you work for.

Always take notes 

Your number one priority as an intern is to learn as much as you can; remember what people tell you. Writing down what people say sends two messages to your team; this kid cares about what I have to say and more importantly, I'm thankfully not going to have to repeat this in 10 minutes.

Be aware of your brand 

Your "brand" is your reputation. From your first-round interview to your last day of internship, you are being evaluated. Stop and self-reflect often during your internship. When thinking of you, do they think tardy, flaky and always on Facebook? Or are you hard working, eager, and willing to learn?

Recognize your value-adding capabilities 

Promote them and protect them. It takes a lot of time to build your brand, but only an instant to nix it. Work isn't like Hollywood: Bad publicity isn't good. In fact it could reflect negatively on your career.

Bad publicity means no money for fun things like paying utilities and buying food. Learning how to manage your brand in your internship will help you when the stakes are higher.

Build your own personal board of directors

Big companies have many executives, consultants and stakeholders; your life is quite similar. Seek intelligent, supportive mentors you respect and appoint them to your own personal board of directors. These are the people you confer with when life is about to kick you in the kneecap. They are teachers, friends, relatives and co-workers you trust. This is not a paid position, so thank them passionately.

Work hard 

You can go to work early, leave late, have quality mentors, schedule lunches and carry a notebook but ultimately, you must drive results. This comes from hard work, and there's no substitute for doing good work.

Go, be awesome and come back with a full-time offer.