As CareerVillage’s first marketing intern, I help tell real stories about the humans using our products and services to explore careers and prepare for jobs. Among others, I told the story of one IT student in the Philippines who connected to the CareerVillage community for guidance on skill-building and project priorities. I told the story of a podiatry student in Oregon who’s using Coach to help rebuild her LinkedIn profile as she moves into her career. What I love about these stories is how, in sharing them, the students are passing on the guidance they received, for others who may need it in the future. 

Over the course of the summer, I also got the chance to speak to a few of my fellow CareerVillage interns to learn more about their experiences and any career wisdom they have for students. 

Funny enough, this whole post started as an idea I floated in one of my first team meetings: I wanted to hear from more than just myself about what the internship experience is really like.

Before we hear from them, and in the spirit of sharing guidance forward, I have a few insights of my own that I’d like to share.

My last internship was at a big ad agency. This one was at a small remote startup. Here’s what I learned 👀 

The summer before this one, I interned at an ad agency, working with big-name clients in a big office. This time, as CareerVillage’s first and only marketing intern, I was fully remote on a small team, and it was a completely different experience.

I immediately felt the difference in team dynamics at a fully remote company, and quickly learned that creating connections with coworkers requires more intention. For example, when everyone isn’t in one building together, you have to schedule intro meetings to meet with people rather than relying on it happening by osmosis in a hallway.

On the other hand, the team being much smaller made it easier to connect with people on other teams. The ability to reach out directly to senior team members in engineering, product, and design, was really valuable to my internship experience. I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to build relationships across the organization – not just within my own team. Building my portfolio and my network at the same time turned out to be a great use of my time this summer.

I’m grateful for everything I learned, and if I had one piece of unsolicited advice for fellow interns, it’d be to use your downtime wisely. A free evening is a chance to build something, learn something, or poke around somewhere totally unfamiliar. It’s one of the best ways to head back to school already a step ahead. In this job market, self-starting is basically a cheat code: if your resume isn’t stacked with internships yet, starting your own project might be the thing that actually gets you noticed.

I don’t have it all figured out, and I’m okay with that. I’m still learning as I go, but staying engaged with the work in front of me is what’s kept me motivated and pointed toward my career goals. Growth isn’t linear, but it adds up. 🌱

As a career development organization, the CareerVillage team takes pride in its internship program, prioritizes delivering great experiences for interns, and truly values our contributions. Each new cohort of summer interns brings fresh perspectives to the team and discovers their own ways to make the most of the experience. This summer, we sat down with three of them: Niya Georgieva (Strategy), Zara Ahmar (Data Science), and Yi Zou (Data Engineering) to talk about what’s working, what they’d do differently, and what they’re taking with them long after the internship ends.

Say yes to more than you think you’re qualified for

If there’s one theme that came up again and again, it’s this: don’t let uncertainty stop you from applying, and don’t assume you already know what you’ll like.

Zara put it simply: apply to things “whether you think you’re qualified or not because you never know what you’re going to get.” She’d know. She started college as a biomedical engineering major, switched to computer science, and only found her way to data science after a required stats class made something click. “The more that I work in it, the more I like it,” she said, to the point that she’s now looking almost exclusively at data science and analyst roles.

Niya echoed the same idea from a different angle: don’t let a subject feel too technical or too far outside your background to try. She described closing doors for herself early on out of fear that something was “too quantitative” for her and her advice now is simple: “You shouldn’t be the person who is closing the doors for yourself.”

Don’t spread yourself too thin

Staying open to new things doesn’t mean saying yes to everything at once. Niya’s advice was to resist the urge to take on too many directions simultaneously: “Don’t spread yourself too thin, because I see a lot of people making this mistake and then struggling to find anything good.” The goal is openness with focus. try many things over time, but give each one enough attention to actually learn from it.

Learn to communicate your work, not just do it

One of the most concrete lessons from the summer came from a project-tracking tool. Zara had been logging her work in Linear with vague, shorthand notes until a conversation with her manager reframed how she thought about it. On a larger team, she realized, people won’t have context on what you’re doing unless you spell it out. Learning to write clear, specific updates about her work turned out to be a skill she expects to carry into any future job, on any team, at any size company.

Pick up the tools of the trade, even ones outside your major

Interns don’t only learn the skills tied to their job title. Niya, in strategy, so far has spent the summer deep in Excel, QuickBooks Online, and Expensify, tools she expects to lean on again in future accounting classes and beyond. Yi, building an AI agent for the first time, said the technical build was only part of the learning curve; equally valuable was learning how to operate in an unstructured project, where the real skill is figuring out what question to ask next, and knowing when to bring that question to a mentor versus dig in solo.

On AI and the future of work

Given how much of this year’s work touches AI directly, I asked the group how they think about it shaping their careers. Zara relayed advice from a data analyst she met at a hackathon: many of today’s roles didn’t exist ten years ago, and the pattern tends to repeat: new tools reduce some tasks while creating entirely new jobs. Yi described a real shift in her own thinking, moving away from “what role does my major point toward” and toward “what do I actually want to work on, and what problem do I care about solving”, a mindset she credits directly to an unexpected highlight of a past internship (also at CareerVillage): conducting research interviews, a responsibility not typically associated with her role as a Data Intern. Niya’s take leaned on something durable: people skills. Roles built around negotiation, sales, or the human touch, she argued, aren’t going anywhere, which is part of why she’s not especially worried about AI reshaping the landscape as dramatically as some predict.

The Big picture

Making the most of an internship isn’t really about packing more hours into the day. It’s about staying curious enough to say yes to the unexpected, disciplined enough to not scatter your focus, and deliberate enough to translate what you’re learning technically and otherwise into something you can carry forward. Whether your internship is this fall or next summer, that combination travels well.