Internships and apprenticeships are a time-honored rite of passage in many industries. We’ve asked some brilliant folks to share some of the most important lessons they learned during these early experiences in their career.

Rochelle Sunglao

I started my hair career as a salon assistant. I learned a lot in that first year, especially in terms of how I wanted to work and give customer service. At that point, I had a schedule where I assisted a particular stylist 3 days a week. Her work flow was super challenging. There were times when we juggled up to 5 clients at a time. It was so wild! I really was pushed physically because when I was on the clock with her, I never stopped. She took minimal breaks, didn’t eat, and was the epitome of “hustle culture”. She made a good amount of money, but it was at the cost of not taking great care of herself. Read more>>

Francesca Petrolo

This story started 12 years ago when I was about to graduate from the Perugia University in Italy and I had to work on my last project. The project that I had decided to work on was about a fish farm. A fish farm is where the fish are created and feed in a laboratory/farm and then moved to the big cage in the open ocean. Then we let them grow naturally in their natural environment. Read more>>

David Halabu

I had two meaningful college internernships that shaped my career path more so than any class I took in four years of college. The summer between my Freshman and Sophmore year in college I worked as an unpaid intern for a stock broker at Prudential Securities in Detroit, Michigan. This was a friend of the family, so it was more a 2 day a week observational internship where I would help the stock broker with anything he needed from getting lunch, to reviewing soon to be earnings of companies, to preparing any literature for a client meeting. Read more>>