You, as a student seeking to complete an internship, will be looking for work experience that will help you get started in the field you have been studying. An internship gives you relevant experience with a real employer who could hire you or make a good recommendation to another possible employer. The internship can be paid or unpaid, but it will be doing work for someone who defines the work you will be doing. You can be hired for a specific internship time (e.g., 14 weeks) or you may just be hired to go to work with no end date intended as your first job related to your major.

Your employer may assign you, as a temporary intern, to a specific project they want completed during your internship semester. Alternatively, they may have you start doing work related to your major without specific responsibilities or a project. If there is a defined project, then the vast majority of this textbook will relate to you as an individual intern doing a specific project. The instructions will often refer to a team/co-workers. This designation is intended to cover project teams, individual interns like yourself, and any co-workers involved in your project or internship responsibilities.

If there is no project defined, this textbook is still valuable for you to reach a clear understanding of your employer's expectations and define how those expectations will be measured. You can report to your employer how you are doing on meeting those expectations. If these expectations are agreed to, they can be considered a project, and the textbook process will relate to you as an intern or employee. 

If you cannot get your employer to set expectations and plan for reporting progress on those expectations, you will have to hold yourself accountable because you are not getting help from your employer. If you hold yourself accountable, you can establish your own expectations or project for improvement and follow the steps in the textbook to increase your chance for success in your internship or job.

As you read the textbook and follow the process look for ways to apply each of the process steps and instructions to you. Where necessary there will be text boxes with instructions on how you might apply the instructions to your circumstances. President Thomas S. Monson of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints made the following quote about goals and measurement of accomplishment.

“When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported, the rate of improvement accelerates.”

So you will need to establish and measure your own expectations by following the processes in this textbook.