Intern's Guide to Success: Goal Setting

Intern’s Guide to Success:

Hey guys! As promised, this week I will be talking about goal setting during your internship. Setting goals can be a difficult sometimes because you may not know where to start, don’t worry though! I’m here to help! As always, these are just my personal opinions, feel free to tweak these suggestions to what best fits you! When I’m setting my goals I like to think about short term and long term. This gives you a way to keep yourself on track and motivated.

Short term:

These are goals that you would like to have completed weekly or biweekly, these should be attainable goals for the time frame. For example I one of my short term goals would be to have three blogs corresponding press releases completed by the end of the week. This goal would be completely attainable because I go into the office twice a week and I will have other tasks to do during those days along with my goal. After completing your goal you should set yourself a new one for the next week or two. Keep doing this until the end of your internship

Long term:

From my personal experience it’s best to make one or two large goals that you would would like to have completed by the end of your internship. My goal for the end of this semester is to have one article published in my company’s magazine as well as have ten blogs written. What I like to do is set reminders for myself in my planner to keep myself on track with these goals because they could be easily forgotten if I don’t keep them fresh in my mind. By the end of the semester I go back and look at the goals I had originally set myself and I can be satisfied after reaching them.

Tips:

One thing that we have learned in a lot of my communication courses have been making S.M.A.R.T goals. This stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely. I like to use this when setting goals for myself to make sure that they are well-rounded. The way to use this acronym is to ask yourself does your goal meet all of the listed requirements. If it does, great! If it doesn’t go back and edit the goal to make sure that it is the best it can be.

Doing this will help a lot when planning your goals.

I hope that this is able to help anyone out there who is struggling with goal setting or that was just looking for a new perspective on creating goals for themselves! Stay tuned for my next blog coming out on April 4th.