With the near end of the month of August, another summer has come and gone. Like any typical college student, my summers are filled with the struggles of balancing the amount of time I work with the amount of time I hang out with my friends, so I can maximize each. Unfortunately, the “work” time usually wins as I end up spending many hours on the clock as I can to avoid having to work when the school year and my soccer season actually start.

I cannot tell you how many times my manager and I discussed the fact that, while I just started, it felt as though I had been there for months. Not all interns in my program necessarily had that experience, though. When I first started, I was thrown into my project right away. Some people may not like that sort of experience, but I thrived on it; I quickly adopted a sort of “sink or swim” mentality where I was either going to work my butt off right away and use my resources and others to learn how to do the job that I was assigned, or I was going to fall behind and be forced to reconsider what my overall goal was with my manager.

So what was my internship exactly? I spent 11 weeks this summer as a Clinical Trial Operations intern for AbbVie, a global biopharmaceutical company with its headquarters in North Chicago. The internship itself was fantastic, and I had a very positive experience as I had the opportunity to experience a possible future patient-care oriented career that I could consider after graduation. However, while I can go on and on about what I did there and all of the opportunities I was given that allowed me to grow both personally and professionally, the overarching experience I gained through my first exposure to corporate America was one of the most important pieces of knowledge I gained during this internship.

So what did I actually learn in my time in corporate America? Everything and nothing all at the same time. My role specifically was more business-oriented, something that I had little to no experience with previously. With that in mind, I was very up front with my manager and communicated with her about my limited experience in both the world of business as well as in Clinical Trial Operations.

What was I supposed to do next, then? Learn, ask questions, and take criticism constructively to better myself as a team member and employee, and use my skills to participate as a study team member and provide support in any way, shape, or form that I can. If that meant that they wanted met to sit and go through a slide deck to edit every footer in order to correctly display the date of a meeting, then that is what I did without any sort of questioning whatsoever.

At the beginning of the summer, I had few responsibilities, and strongly disliked coming to work. I, like any naïve college student in his or her first internship, wanted a big project. Looking back, what made me any different from any other person that I should get that kind of project? For however frustrated I was at the time at my lack of independence or responsibilities, that was critical to my development. I quickly learned what I needed to do to both get my tasks done efficiently and effectively, as well as incorporate feedback from other study team members into my projects so that they could be as beneficial as possible at the end of the day. And what happened? Sure enough, by the end of the summer, I was getting more and more responsibilities on a daily basis. Moral of the story is that there is a method to the madness, and the struggle (even if there is a little sinking for a bit) makes the reward of a “Job Well Done!” that much sweeter.

At the end of the day, my internship was single-handedly one of the best things that have happened to me so far in my college career. Was it hard work? Absolutely. But the experiences I learned will be exactly those that will provide me with opportunities for growth in the future or set me apart from other candidates applying for jobs.

For the record, unlike most stereotypical internships, I don't think I ever got anyone else any coffee. In fact, on my first day they even showed me where the two coffee machines are and how to use them so that I could make myself a nice cup of coffee in the morning when I got to work.