Who is the better intern? Graduate v. Undergrad. Round 2 – Interviewing

If you are reading this article because you want to know how to “ace” your next internship interview, allow me to redirect you here. Likely you have read one (or 100) of those articles before, and we can’t tell you anything you haven’t already learned. Nathan and I went through a bunch of interviews last Spring looking for our current internship. Through the process we discovered that all of those aforementioned articles are about the best way for you to impress YOUR interviewer, when interviewers should be trying equally as much to impress YOU – after all, you are the perfect candidate for the job! Continue Reading

Who is the better intern? Graduate v. Undergrad. Round 1

Mallory: I’m Mallory, I am an advertising graduate student, I just turned 27, and I don’t know how to make coffee. The only time I have ever made it was when a teacher in high school asked me to make coffee for her. “Err…OK,” I thought. I stared at her blankly until I said to myself, “I’m 18, I should know how to do this. I’ll just go figure it out.” 10 years later, that is still the only pot of coffee I have ever brewed, and I am pretty proud of that fact. That being said, I have never had one of those “coffee schlepping” internships that businesses are so quick to tell you they don’t offer.

My first internship was in 2007 when I graduated from the University of Arkansas. I interned at a local theater, the Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville, Ark. As a PR intern, I helped distribute promotional materials around town when I wasn’t writing articles for local magazines and newspapers. It was valuable and fun. Once, I drank a bottle of $500 wine on my 22nd birthday courtesy of the Art of Wine event. Livin’. The. Dream. I moved from there to a job in the “real world” – figuring, sadly, that I would never wear the “intern” badge again. But here I am, fresh from my first year of graduate school, with 5 years of work experience under my belt, and assuming the intern role once again. This time, at a company called Build-a-Sign. And sitting to my right, my fellow intern, a 20-year-old undergraduate – Nathan. Continue Reading