Former eBay executive shares her 15 tips to impress your boss at an internship

You’ve finished your last final exam and your internship starts next week. In an ideal world, this internship will provide you with a defined project that precisely leverages your skills and allows you to make a meaningful difference in the world.

In an ideal world, you’ll be a member of a supportive, high-functioning team with a terrific boss who will coach and mentor you. You’ll go to work everyday inspired and finish the summer with a new set of skills and clarity about your future goals.

Except, it’s really not going to happen like that.

In the real world, organizations are messy and priorities shift. Your boss is struggling to find time to coach her full-time team and let's face it, you just don't have a lot of marketable skills yet.

That’s no fault of yours – it’s a function of beginning your career journey.

But all hope is not lost.

If you work at it, you’ll be able to find a way to add value to your team. And, in return, you’ll get insights into how organizations work in the real world. But it will take hard work and a strategy.

Before I share tips on how to impress your boss and get the most out of your internship, I'd like to tell you a quick story about Calvin. He's proof that even the youngest interns can make an impact.

At eBay one summer, a 16-year-old kid was foisted on my team as a summer intern — a neighbor of an executive. What were we going to do with a 16-year-old kid? We already had two summer interns doing their MBAs at Stanford. At face value, Calvin seemed like a waste of our time.

It turns out Calvin was one of our best summer interns. Ever.

He was always cheerful. He worked hard – staying late with the team until 7 or 8 p.m. And he had skills. He was a whizz at making PowerPoint decks look better. He even knew how to use Photoshop, which none of us could do. Low and behold, he was really good at Excel pivot tables.

We would have hired him back in a heartbeat and 15 years later I still remember his name.

I've worked with many interns over the years and would like to share some advice.

1. Do Your Research About the Company

Before your first day, put your Google and LinkedIn skills to work and be able to answer the following questions about the company.

If it’s possible, be the customer. Buy and use the company’s product. Note what the experience was like. If you can’t be the customer, see if you can find people who use the product and talk to them about their experience.

If the company is public, listen to the recording of their last quarterly earnings call. You'll be able to find it on the investor tab on their website. It will last about an hour and the CEO and CFO will give an update and then financial analysts will ask questions. It will give you some of the best insight into what the company's current priorities and challenges are.

2. Know What Your Skills Are and How Your Boss Can Use Them

Here’s the truth: At the beginning, your boss isn’t going to know how best to use you. After a few attempts to figure out what you can do, she might find it is just easier to give you some “busy work” that doesn’t really matter to the organization, just to keep you occupied and out of her hair. Not the best outcome for you.

Here’s a different approach. Help your boss out by telling her what you can do and how she can use your skills. Writing and editing? Graphics and design? Analysis and Excel? Make it easy for her to get you working on stuff that actually matters to the team’s goals. Here’s a list of possibilities:

Writing and editing:

Do research on a topic and write a short briefing report.
Create draft posts for blogs or social media.
Monitor and analyze your company and your competitors' social media profile.

Graphics and design:

Format and edit PowerPoint decks.
Make awesome looking graphics in Canva.
Film and edit videos.

Analysis and Excel

Analyze survey data and make charts.
Prepare a competitive analysis that compares product features and costs.
Analyze the performance of recent marketing campaigns.

3. Sharpen Your Sword On Your Own Time

Once you've figured out what skills your project will leverage, get Ninja-good at them...on your own time. There are plenty of videos on YouTube with how-to tips. There's also a bunch of great videos at LeanIn.org. Some are aimed at working moms, but others are applicable to anyone such as Communicating with Confidence or Taming Adrenaline. There are even online courses.

4. Don’t be Afraid of Grunt Work

Ideally, you’ll be able to work on a project over the summer and it is something that gives you a chance to plan, execute and present. But, more often than not, there is a fair amount of grunt work.

That's OK. As a manager once told me, to grow into an effective manager later in life, you need to know enough about what’s involved in a task so that you can delegate it, supervise it and ask questions about it.

All jobs at every level come with aspects that aren't fun — but professionals roll up their sleeves and get on with it. You do yourself no favors thinking something isn't interesting enough for you.

5. Be Coachable

Your manager will need to invest time in you to help you be productive. How much time she invests will be a function on whether she’s seeing a return on that time. The best ways to show you want to learn is to ask for coaching (and be responsive to it), show curiosity about how things work and be committed to add value to the team.

6. Draft Your Own Reference Letter

Okay, this will feel super weird and awkward but it is critical.

One of the reasons you're doing an internship is to get a good reference. But in a year or two when you're applying for other jobs your manager may have moved on to other things. Best to get a written letter of recommendation from them now.

How? Offer to draft it so they can edit it. Yes, this will feel really weird because you aren’t used to writing nice things about yourself but it is standard practice in business. It is a lot easier for your manager to start with something you’ve written and make additions and edits than to start from scratch.

Here's something to know about reference letters. They'll always only say nice things. The question is what they don't say. Do they praise you for being on time and always showing up for work? That's a pretty low bar. Or does it say you made a meaningful contribution to the team's work? That's what you're aiming for.

A week or two into your internship, draft an aspirational reference letter for yourself. Keep it in your back pocket, as a way to help you know what you’re aiming for. Here’s what it will include:

7. Be Ready To Ask Important Questions

Sometime in your first week, possibly your first day, your manager will sit down with you to get you started on a project or some tasks.

Here is a script of some questions you’re going to want to ask your boss. Practice saying them in front of the mirror to gain confidence.

And be ready to answer this question:

8. Do Your Work Right

Whether it is a big project or a small task, here are questions you can ask to make sure you get it right.

Bonus points for interns who send a very, very short email update to their boss at the end of each day. Two sentences: "Today I did X… Tomorrow I will focus on Y." If you have a question, you can add it. That way your boss can course correct if things aren’t going in the right direction.

9. Be Part of the Team

Be part of the “we”. Use “we” when you’re talking about the company. You're "us" and "we" when you're part of a business team. Not "me" or "I."

10. Be Curious.

Always.

11. Build Your Networking Skills at Lunch

Every office has a lunch culture and it’s good to figure out early what that is. Does the whole team go to lunch together everyday? Or do people arrange lunch meet-ups for themselves?

If possible, ask your boss to let you know people that it would be good to have lunch with.

Use your lunch with them as a chance to learn more about their team and what makes them tick. Read their LinkedIn profile before hand. Send them an email invite that reads something like this:

Hi (name),

I’m a summer intern working for ___ and she thought you would be a great person to meet. Are you free for lunch (or coffee) one day next week? I would love to learn more about your background and what you do for the company.

During the lunch, your genuine curiosity will take you far but here are some great conversation starters:

When you get back to your desk, send a short thank you email, right away.

As you can imagine, if you can have 20 lunches with different people over the summer, you'll have accumulated great insights into the company and how people chose the career paths they did. It will be like Career Week on steroids. The insights from these lunches is one of the most helpful things about an internship.

Does it feel weird or scary to reach out to someone much older and ask them to go for lunch? Yes. But know that in most situations they’ll be flattered you asked. In my 12 years at eBay I don’t think I ever turned down a junior employee asking to get together for lunch and some career insights.

People enjoy being helpful and it will make them feel good too.

12. Learn Through Observation

Maybe the topic at hand isn’t relevant to your project or interesting to you, but watch closely and you’ll be able to learn a lot.

These are the sort of interpersonal behaviors that will serve you well in the future.

13. Dress Professionally

What should I wear? This is an eternal question. Your school wardrobe probably doesn’t cut it, but a new wardrobe is expensive.

Invest in a few appropriate pieces, and don’t worry about wearing them a lot. In general, you don’t want your clothing to be what gets you noticed. No bare arms, cleavage, shorts, short skirts, crop tops, visible undergarments, sneakers or sandals. Jeans, if they are widely worn are okay, but not if they're ripped.

Remember: Just because someone in accounting wears flip flops and tank tops doesn’t mean you should.

14. Stay off Your Phone/Social Media

Personal texting, emails and the like should only happen on your lunch break or after hours. It might feel like exile to be off Instagram or Snapchat for hours at a time, but it’s expected in a professional environment. Putting your phone down or quickly changing your computer screen when someone comes up to your desk is a dead giveaway you’re focused on your own agenda and not your employer's.

And remember, any online activities that take place over the company network are not private (your boss or someone at the company can see what you do online).

Also, your company probably has guidelines to what you can/can’t post about the company online, especially on social media. Read and follow them. A nice photo of your team at your end of summer farewell, and a heartfelt message thanking them is great. Anything else probably isn’t helpful.

Most companies don't mind if you listen to music with earbuds while you're working, but check with your boss. Ask, "I like to wear earphones because it helps me concentrate. Will that be okay here?"

15. Always Be Nice to the Admins

This is good advice for you in all your future jobs, but especially as an intern. Admins are the people who run the office, assist executives and generally keep things running smoothly. They'll be on the lookout for any signs of an entitled attitude and having one won't go well for you.

Be friendly and polite always, and super grateful if they do help you. Admins are good at letting their boss know how different folks in the organization treat them. Be one of the good ones.

That’s kind of a lot isn’t it?

This is a new and exciting experience and one to approach with gratitude. There will be good parts and bad parts but, most importantly, you’ll get to see what goes on in the working world.

Do your best, work hard and embrace the learning.

Kristina Klausen is the founder/CEO of PandaTree, an online resource to help kids become fluent in foreign languages. Before that, she spent more than 10 years at eBay Inc., where she worked in several leadership positions including corporate strategy and product management. Born in Canada, Klausen has an MBA from Harvard Business School and is enrolled as a part-time student in the Masters of Liberal Arts program at Stanford University. Kristina has two daughters who are currently learning Mandarin. She loves to travel, practice her French, do yoga and hike with her kids and dog.

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