Most college students interested in pursuing an internship will automatically gravitate towards established companies.
After all, a summer with Google, Deloitte or a Wall Street firm will carry plenty of cachet and opportunity for any student determined to find a job that kick-starts a successful career.
But some enterprising college students might feel destined to forge a different path. And would significantly benefit from serving an internship with an early-stage startup instead.
The question is, why? What’s the difference, if any, between interning with a start-up versus an established corporation?
Which kind of organisation, if either, is better for an internship? A big corporation that’s already conquering the world, or a disruptive upstart that’s building from scratch? Which experience is more likely to promote an entrepreneurial mindset? And, ultimately, which course of action should future venture founders take?
Real-life challenges
We know about internships with startups. Internships available through Lehigh@NasdaqCenter, an exclusive education-industry partnership between Lehigh University and the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center in San Francisco, are different from those at most other higher education institutions.
We specialise in operating programmes that pair student interns with startups all over the world. In the past year alone, we brought together 118 students from 35 disciplines for internships with 61 early-stage companies across 12 industries.
Demand is skyrocketing and admission is highly selective. Last year, 379 students and 481 startups applied for our internship programmes.
An internship with a startup is a deeper, broader experience all around. Sometimes student interns in a corporate setting are given too little to do or are outright neglected.
Only once in a while do they actually get to do anything substantial. Rarely, however, does that happen in a startup.
In the best scenarios, interns at startups tackle real-life challenges in real-life environments, gaining real-life experience that presents real-life advantages.
Rather than merely listening to and observing more experienced employees in action, they participate in – and directly contribute to – vital day-to-day business functions.
Call it the ‘Startup Advantage’.
Interns plugging away at startups learn something they can learn nowhere else and get to show what they can do outside a classroom. They can be at once independent, entrepreneurial and, above all, pivotal in enabling a new venture to succeed.
A win-win scenario
Startups require interns to be especially resilient and resourceful. They have to learn to hustle in an unstructured setting, persevere and identify solutions to problems.
Throughout the process, they pick up a feel for the dynamics of the fast-paced startup workplace and a sense of what working in this unique ecosystem might be like if they’re hired. And, better yet, what it might be like to launch their own venture someday.
The startups themselves benefit, too. Most startups can never hire enough people to keep up with rapid growth and the desperate need for top performers.
By bringing in interns, they gain access to new ideas and connect with fresh talent with the potential to graduate into a future employee.
Under ideal circumstances, nobody has to file documents or fetch coffee. All interns are expected to drive the projects assigned. They conduct research, build a business case and evaluate return on investment. They get to stretch and truly own something.
The students work alongside founders and entrepreneurial leaders on achieving milestones that are key to company growth. By entering a high-velocity environment, they get to see first-hand how startups operate early on.
This exposure to the dynamic culture of startups lets students apply the lessons learned in the classroom to real-world business problems. Students are matched with alumni mentors who have relevant expertise.
In bridging the academic and the professional, our internship programmes create an experience that is impossible to duplicate in a classroom. Interns attack complex problems and propose new solutions.
In these real-world projects, they perform financial modelling and analysis to improve operational efficiency, design customer experience maps, create strategic marketing campaigns, and more.
Student experiences
Our students come from all backgrounds and major in subjects spanning the spectrum from finance and computer engineering to international relations and supply chain management. They intern with startups located everywhere from the United Kingdom, Holland and the Netherlands to the United Arab Emirates and India.
Each student has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get a hands-on education in entrepreneurship alongside startup leaders who daily confront real-world business issues.
How better for an intern to hone entrepreneurial chops than to work shoulder to shoulder with a founder? And in the process, students accrue the professional benefits of going global with a startup.
Some tell-tale common denominators and recurring themes have emerged from the students’ experiences over the seven years we’ve been operating.
Students cite how they learn the value of asking questions, communicating effectively, collaborating with teammates yet operating independently, breaking free from a comfort zone, and cultivating a truly global entrepreneurial mindset. They develop competencies across cultures and time zones.
More than ever before, startups are hiring college interns from within. Those newly minted graduates are getting what every intern leaving the campus with a diploma wants most of all: a full-time job.
The former interns take on those jobs knowing full well that just as every global giant came into being as a startup, so every startup has a chance to be the next Uber or OpenAI.
Samantha Dewalt is managing director of Lehigh@NasdaqCenter, an exclusive education-industry partnership between Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center in San Francisco, USA. Sarah Leedberg is assistant director of innovation programs at Lehigh@NasdaqCenter.
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