As soon as you think of an intern, you think of a naïve, ambitious youngster, eager to please by getting coffee and photocopies, pen and pad in hand. But also, someone who gets bored with no real job profile, sitting out the hours on a desk.
But some interns used their time most usefully, learnt a great deal and applied it. This became a part of their success stories. Here are some such interns who have made it big in life.
Steve Jobs
The Founder of Apple, was an intern at the Hewlett-Packard Company. He did his first internship at the age of 12 at HP in Palo Alto, California. After his internship, he was later hired there, where he worked with Steve Wozniak as a summer employee. They both went on to co-found Apple Computer.
Bill Gates
The Co-Founder of Microsoft, worked as a congressional page for his internship. His interests beyond technology date back to his internship days. He worked as a Congressional page for his state legislature in Seattle at the age of 17, and later at the House of Representatives in 1973. His responsibilities included delivering messages, preparing the House chambers for each day’s session and performing other administrative tasks.
Elon Musk
He did several internships. He was a summer intern at the Bank of Nova Scotia, while still at Queens University in Ontario; an intern at Microsoft Canada; and a video game programmer for Rocket Science Games. Musk later moved to California to start a PhD in physics and interned at Pinnacle Research, an energy storage startup.
Sergey Brin
Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, spent his summer as an intern at Wolfram Research, the company which is popular for its software Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, a computational knowledge search engine.During the internship, he developed a code analysis and extraction tool for the Mathematica source code.
Ursula Burns
The CEO of Xerox, began working there as a summer intern. She started working at Xerox in 1980 as a mechanical engineering summer intern while completing a master’s degree at Columbia University.From there, Burns worked her way up from positions in product development and planning to executive assistant and vice president, before becoming a CEO in 2009.
Indra Nooyi
Listed among the most powerful women by Forbes, Indra Nooyi interned with Booz Allen Hamilton, an American management consulting firm. As an Indian student in US with very little money, she also worked as a receptionist at the same time for some extra bugs.
Steven Spielberg
As an intern at Universal Studios, Spielberg made his first short film for theatrical release, the 26-minute Amblin’ (1969). After Sidney Sheinberg, then vice president of production for Universal’s television arm, saw the film, Spielberg became the youngest director ever to be signed for a long-term deal with a major Hollywood studio.
Kevin Systrom
Before founding Instagram along with his co-founder, Kevin Systrom was an Intern at a company called Odeo, which later launched Twitter.
Oprah Winfrey
The famed TV host got her start at WLAC-TV, a CBS affiliate in Nashville, Tenn. She did such a stellar job delivering the news that the program brought her on fulltime as an anchor-reporter.
Kavin Mittal
Prior to becoming an entrepreneur, the founder of Delhi-based messaging app Hike Messenger held several internships while completing a master’s in electrical engineering at Imperial College London. He was an associate vehicle engineer intern for McLaren Racing, an associate technology manager at Google, and a summer analyst at Goldman Sachs.
Sachin Bansal
The co-founder of Flipkart did his 3-month internship at Kent Ridge Digital Labs. He worked on a project which involved Extraction of visual features from a JPEG image and from an MPEG movie file.
These success stories are an inspiration to take the internship seriously as it make or break your career.
