Talia Kusmirek was making Fourth of July plans when her boss asked her to take a last-minute business trip from San Francisco to London. It was the kind of drop-everything request familiar to jet-setting professionals, except for one thing.
Kusmirek is a 20-year-old intern.
Forget about fetching coffee. This summer's interns are leading projects, working directly with clients and flying to Europe. Their richer experiences are the upside of recent cuts to internship programs.
Artificial intelligence is eating into some of the menial tasks traditionally performed by interns. Plus, companies that expect to hire fewer new graduates need thinner pipelines of student workers. These developments build on a yearslong push to pay interns, which has caused some businesses to scale back programs that used to produce free labor.
While there aren't as many internship opportunities, those that remain often come with higher-level responsibilities.
Kusmirek's work includes spearheading a social-media strategy for Nooks, a company that uses AI to help clients generate sales leads. The Boston College student is a Kleiner Perkins fellow, and Nooks is part of KP's venture-capital portfolio.
She says she earned co-workers' confidence by boosting key engagement metrics in the first month of her internship. That led to the impromptu request to attend an event across the pond, where she worked alone to produce social content.
The assignment surprised some colleagues, in part because she was gone and back in 48 hours. Perhaps also because it was a lot of trust to place in someone relatively inexperienced.
"People in the office were, like, 'You went to London? What?'" Kusmirek says.
Internships as auditions
Nooks Chief Executive Daniel Lee says the business trip was a testament to Kusmirek's ability but also indicative of a broader shift in how companies view internships. With DoorDash for the coffee run and AI to answer the phone, there is little reason to bring in college kids unless they can pull their weight on meaningful tasks.
"We're not a charity," he says. "We want great people to do good work, then tell their friends and come back."
Since the company's launch in 2020, most interns have gone on to become full-time employees, according to Lee. They also serve as a referral network.
In certain sectors, like finance and consulting, it has long been common for interns to do substantive work. Standouts often receive job offers before their final year of college. Internships in a wider range of fields increasingly function like auditions where students temporarily perform the duties of new hires.
Two years ago, the overall conversion rate from intern to employee was 50.6%, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Last year, the rate jumped to 63.1%, underscoring the role of internships as test drives for real jobs.
Aaron Huestis, a field operations manager at University Hospitals in the Cleveland area, recently promoted an intern to a full-time position. He oversees a team of IT workers at four hospital locations and says interns are often technically proficient when they arrive.
The skills gap between newcomers and veterans is further diminished by the speed of technological changes. There's always a new device to introduce, or software system to roll out, and everyone has to learn at the same time.
What Huestis wants to see is whether an intern possesses, or can pick up, the instincts to work in a hospital setting.
"Healthcare is a wild place," he says. "There could be a full trauma coming in, and you're responding to a help ticket for a printer. So, you need to read the room: Does now seem like a good time to approach the nurses' station or do I need to just be a wallflower for a moment because they're making life-and-death decisions?"
Generational insights
Soft skills often come with maturity, but in certain cases interns' youth can be an asset.
"They are absolutely the audience that almost 100% of our clients want to tap in to," says Brook Jay, CEO of marketing company All Terrain. This summer the company charged interns Lily Tomey, Luke Thiesse and Hannah Tate-Arena with designing a campaign for a brand with little inherent appeal to Gen Z, "just to see where their heads would go. Their ideas were fresh and interesting."
So interesting, in fact, that All Terrain had the interns pitch those ideas directly to the client.
"We were shocked," says Tate-Arena, a marketing major at the University of Alabama. "It was really nice to hear that we are on the right track and that they liked our work enough that they wanted to share it for the client to actually see."
Young people have always had smart ideas and cultural insights. They haven't always been empowered to speak up.
Jay recalls listening quietly when she was in her interns' shoes years ago. She caught a break when a senior colleague missed a flight, and leading a big business meeting suddenly fell to her. She stepped up and earned more responsibility after that.
A lot of us have early career stories like this -- happy accidents that opened doors. More businesses are wisely deciding not to leave interns' breakout moments to chance.
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