When I started looking for a summer internship, I was mostly focused on just getting one. It felt like everyone around me was applying somewhere, interviewing somewhere, or already announcing where they would be working. I was updating my résumé, rewriting cover letters, preparing for interviews, and tailoring myself to whatever position was in front of me. Somewhere in that process, I got very good at thinking about what employers wanted from me, but I never stopped to ask, What do I want out of this internship? 

I knew the standard answers: professional experience, new skills, and the chance to learn how an organization actually worked. I was so focused on securing an internship that I never really asked myself what would make one meaningful. The application process didn’t encourage that either. Between repetitive interview questions and increasingly AI-run interviews, I often felt more concerned with giving the “right” response than having an actual conversation about what I could bring to an organization—or what I hoped to learn there. 

My interview with Coqual was the first time that dynamic shifted. My interviewer, Danielle Cruz, Vice President, People & Experience, had clearly read my résumé beforehand, so I didn’t spend the conversation reciting it back to her. Instead, she asked about my experiences, what interested me, and where those interests might fit across Coqual’s work. I had room to ask my own questions and connect my experiences to current projects. For the first time, I left an interview excited about the work I might contribute to and the people I could learn from, rather than wondering whether I had impressed them. 

That continued once I started. In my first conversations with colleagues, I kept hearing the same question: What do you want to get out of this internship, and how can I help? The funny thing was, I wasn’t entirely sure yet. I had spent months preparing answers about what I could offer an employer, but I hadn’t prepared an answer for what I wanted an employer to offer me. 

Over the summer, that answer became much clearer: I had been looking for mentorship. 

I had always imagined mentorship as something formal, but at Coqual I found it in much smaller interactions. When I had a question, someone answered it or pointed me toward a colleague who knew more. People from research, outreach, and other teams made time to meet with me even when we weren’t working on the same projects. They asked about my interests and recommended people to meet, projects to explore, and resources that could help. 

That support even extended beyond my internship. When I talked about my independent research on Cherokee language revitalization, colleagues offered advice from their own research experience, and one even recommended software that could support my project. It had nothing to do with my responsibilities as an intern—it was simply something I cared about, and they wanted to help. 

That curiosity became a defining part of my summer. I found myself asking how AI could support research, how information moved between teams, why we approached projects in certain ways, and what happened after I handed something off. I wasn’t just learning how to complete my piece of a project—I was learning how it fit into the bigger picture. 

I also stopped pretending I understood every professional term I heard. Earlier in the summer, I probably would have made a mental note to look something up later. Eventually, I became comfortable simply asking. That shift made me noticeably more confident in a professional environment. 

That confidence is probably the most important thing I’ll take away from this internship. College has taught me how to research, write, analyze information, and develop an argument. But there are parts of working with other people that are difficult to practice in a classroom. I needed to experience what it was like to contribute one piece of a larger project without controlling the final product, to ask someone with a completely different role for their perspective, and to work through challenges when I didn’t immediately know the answer. Most importantly, I needed people who were willing to let me learn those things rather than expecting me to know them already. 

That experience has also changed how I think about internships and entry-level work. Students are constantly told how important it is to gain experience, while many opportunities increasingly expect us to arrive with experience already in hand. If those early opportunities continue to shrink, or become places where young professionals are expected to prove what they already know, where are we supposed to learn workplace judgment, collaboration, communication, and confidence? 

Internships are valuable because they give people a place to learn those things. 

My experience at Coqual has also changed the questions I’ll ask the next time I’m looking for an opportunity. I’ll still care about the work, but I’ll pay much more attention to the people doing it. Are they curious about what I want to learn? Will I feel comfortable asking questions? Will they explain not only what I’m doing, but why? Will they care about where I want to go next, even if that path eventually leads somewhere else? 

For students beginning the internship search, those are questions worth asking before getting too caught up in becoming the perfect candidate. There will always be another résumé edit, another cover letter to tailor, or another interview to prepare for. Those things matter. But so does knowing what you want the experience on the other side of that application to give you. 

I started my search thinking almost entirely about what I could offer an organization. It took being surrounded by people who kept asking what they could offer me to realize that what I’d been looking for all along wasn’t just an internship—it was mentorship.