It’s getting to that time of the year where us college students are wrapping up our summer internships and heading back to college. It’s pretty easy to just peace out on your last day and get swept up into the craziness that is your undergraduate education.

You don’t want to do that. Take a moment to run through this checklist to make sure you get the most and continue to get the most out of your summer job experience.

1. Create a space to maintain connections.

I’m not sure how I feel about LinkedIn. The site is pretty ugly from a design standpoint, and I haven’t made made any connections on it to people I didn’t already know. However, LinkedIn does offer a space for you to maintain connections that you made while at your internship.

Take some time to create a complete profile and then add your colleagues and connections. When you begin looking for a permanent position and need to ask for recommendations, you’ll be thankful that you stayed in contact with your colleagues.

75% of hiring managers use LinkedIn to research job candidates before making an offer, so even if you don’t see the immediate benefits on using the site, you can be sure that it is actually important to have a presence here. What if your colleagues aren’t on LinkedIn? See my next point…

2. Send a personal note to any individuals that you worked with directly.

Photo by kcolwell on Flickr

Sending a note isn’t just about sucking up to your boss (although a little flattery never hurts, does it?). Carefully think about what these people taught you and thank them for those specific things.

This will show that not only are you appreciative of your summer experience, but that you can reflect on what you have learned and grow from it. This also creates the space to contact your colleagues by email in the future.

The format of your note depends on the formality of your work environment. In more formal workplaces, a handwritten note might be appropriate, whereas in a more casual environment, a simple well-written email would be received just as well.

3. Make a list of what you accomplished on the job.

Keep a list of all the projects and accomplishment that you directly influenced and the specific impact that these projects had on your company. Be as specific as possible.

For example, instead of “Helped research search engine optimization strategies,” write down “Implemented specific SEO strategies which brought our forward-facing website from #9 to #1 on Google.” Not only will this help you update your resume more effectively, but you’ll also be able to better convey in future interviews what deliverables you have to offer.

4. Reflect on what you learned about yourself and your values.

I ask myself every Monday, “What did I learn last week?” To get the most out of your internship, you have to be consciously aware of what you are learning about yourself. Internships are the perfect time to try things out. Even if you didn’t have the super awesome internship experience you were hoping for, you now know what to look for and what to avoid when you are looking for a job in the future.

For example, I loved working this summer at NationalField because I had full control of choosing and executing my own projects. The startup atmosphere was exciting and fast-paced and I was able to set my own hours.

What did you like or dislike about your internship this summer? Make sure you remember these things when looking for a permanent position in the future.

Oops! From RIPizzo on Flickr

With all the mainstream media’s attention on social media, there are a lot of eager people jumping into the game without knowing what they are doing.  While that is one way to learn, and don’t get me wrong, I am a huge advocate of learning through experimentation, it is also useful to learn from other people’s mistakes.  Here are some common mistakes that I see every day:

1. Assuming Content Will Build an Audience

Building an audience has three basic steps: (1) The initial hook, (2) Drawing in with engaging content, and (3) Bringing them back with the promise of more.

This takes lots of time and lots of work.  No one just publishes a book and instantly becomes famous (except maybe JK Rowling), and content on the web is not different.  People aren’t going to look at your work just because online content is easier to access.

True, good content is by far the most important thing to have when trying to build an audience, but it by no means will build you an audience.

Just three days after filling the house at Boston’s Symphony Hall, where averaged priced seats run at $100 a pop, world renowned violinist Joshua Bell performed 6 classical pieces for 43 minutes at the L’Enfant Plaza metro stop in Washington, DC as part of an experiment organized by The Washington Post.  Out of the 1,097 people that walked by, only one person stopped to listen to his music.

What does this tell you?  You won’t find success with talent alone.

2. Sacrificing Usability for Design

Artists generally want a unique looking web presence.  We don’t like templates, we don’t like anything mainstream and we don’t like being forced to look like something.  That is why I love artists, because we reject the status quo and innovate instead.  But what we have to be careful of is pushing the envelope too far.  If you are going to go with something unconventional, make sure you still have the 6 Elements of a Killer Website.

3. Not Using Analytics

What do you want out of being in social media?  Blog subscribers?  Traffic?  More sales?  Don’t just blindly trust that your practices are actually helping you reach your goals.  Whatever you decide your metrics to be, make sure you are tracking them.  Google Analytics is a great tool for tracking progress (and it has easy integration with WordPress).

4. Inconsistent Branding on Multiple Platforms

Artists want to be as prolific as possible, which means being present on all the various social media platforms.  These various profiles should not be managed as separate entities, but rather as a comprehensive representation of you as an artist.  While different platforms have different purposes, a viewer should have a similar experience and be able to access similar content on all of your social media profiles.

Last week, I showed you some artists that have great homes on the web. As an artist, it’s important to have a web presence because it is often the most effective way to connect with potential clients and fans.

No one cares how good you are if they don’t know who you are. For this post, I collaborated with my colleague and friend (oh, and brother), Teague Hopkins, MBA student at Babson’s Graduate School of Business to show creative-minded people how to get their own website.

Plot of Land

Just like you need a plot of land to build a house on, the physical space where you store the files that make up your website is your web host. Some domain registrars also offer web hosting, and while the integration may be appealing, it can make it more difficult to switch if you should have problems with either in the future. Web hosts come in a variety of flavors, but most small sites just getting started will choose shared hosting. Shared hosting simply means the web host is using one server to host multiple sites. This makes it less expensive.

By Olof on Flickr

A couple of businesses that offer shared hosting are BlueHost and DreamHost. Shared hosting for either of these runs about $6/month, and may require a one- or two-year contract. While both of these companies offer unlimited bandwidth and storage space, you should check these two numbers if you choose to find a different host. Storage or hosting space is the equivalent of our square footage, and simply governs the amount of stuff that you can put on your web host.

Bandwidth doesn’t have a direct analog in our physical building analogy, but in talking about web hosts it is a measure of the amount of data transferred to and from your web host in a given month. A large number of people downloading large files from your website will use a lot of bandwidth.

Once you have both a host and a domain name, you can log into your registrar’s control panel to point your domain to your new host.

Merchandise

Once your building (CMS) is up and running, the last step is to move in. Add content to your site through your CMS and check out your new website! Tell all your friends. Add links to your website to your profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

There are limitless possibilites for what to do next, but this is the extent of this primer. If you have questions about anything you read here, please leave a comment and we’ll try to answer it or point you to some more comprehensive resources. I hope you found this introduction helpful and send me an email once you’re moved in!

Ridington Room

We are the procrastination nation. It happens every day. You should be working on a presentation for next week’s meeting or finishing your paper for tomorrow’s class (or, more likely, starting it), but instead you end up reading FailBlog for an hour. (It’s just so damn addicting!)

Today, there was something that you should have done, but didn’t. But why? Identifying what is making you procrastinate is the first step.

I should have written a blog post last week. I did not write one. Why? Last week I read a post by Rebecca Thorman called “Stop writing about social media to be a successful blogger”. A lot of her points hit home.

There are a lot of social media “experts” (usually self-proclaimed) out there that tell you what you should or shouldn’t be doing with social media, how things are supposed to work. Rebecca nicely points out that this is “really freaking boring”.

So that got me thinking. And I thought for a while. Am I boring? Am I unoriginal? Maybe. Probably. But at least I’m doing something.

I think this is a brilliant anecdote. It is often not the brilliant minds that have success or the most talent people that get noticed. It’s the people that get things done.

So, how do you become the type of person that gets things done?