By CareerActually contributor, Todd Green

Todd Green is a Visiting Lecturer on Media at four UK universities. This post was originally published on a site he has built to support Media students: TheMediaStudentHandbook.com. If you have any questions or would like Todd’s advice, you can contact him through that site or via Twitter @toddmgreen 

For many university students, summer internships are a great way to build their career track record. Internships are often hard to get however, so here’s an alternative way to create a summer project and gain that all important experience that shows  future employers you’re smart, motivated, and have solid digital skills. Nice 🙂

Here’s how to do it in brief:

1. Choose something you think is cool

2. Set the deadline – this is one week before you return to university

3. Decide what you want to learn about the thing you think is cool – what are you going to investigate?

4. Decide where you want to end up – what’s the goal, and how will you know when you are done?

5. Go to wordpress.com and set up a blog

6. Boom! It’s go time – start learning, and post info on your site about what you’ve learnt + how you are progressing towards your end goal

Concrete example:

A friend’s son got in touch because he didn’t get an internship and was worried he’d waste his summer. Now he’s doing a cricket tactics blog – learning how to write, how to reach an audience, how to engage with readers, how to self-promote, and how to use social networks like a pro. By the end of the summer he’ll have practical, useful skills, and a self-initiated project to point to from his CV. Nice 🙂

Here’s how to do it in detail:

1. Choose something you think is cool

New Premier League season? Bat For Lashes? Orange Is The New Black? Game Of Thrones? DIY? Surfing? London Grime? Jewellery of the Ivory Coast? Call Of Duty? Roman history? Headphone technology? Cubist architecture? Eurovision? Desert Gospels?

2. Set the deadline – this is one week before you return to university

Write the date on something and stick it to the wall somewhere you will see it every day. This is crucial. If you can’t find something to write on, write the date on the damn wall instead.

3. Decide what you want to learn about the thing you think is cool

New Premier League season – how good are experts are predicting results?

Bat For Lashes – what do their lyrics actually mean?

Orange Is The New Black – what are fans saying about the show?

Game Of Thrones – what are the main differences between the books and the TV show?

DIY – can you master the skills required to put up new wallpaper?

Surfing – what are the greatest surfers of all time doing now?

London Grime – who are the top producers behind the up and coming artists?

Jewellery of the Ivory Coast – does it actually exist? I assume so but I just made this one up

Call Of Duty – how similar is the game to real-life battles?

Roman history – what are the best digital humanities resources around today, and how do they compare?

Headphone technology – pick the top ten best-selling headphones, and compare them using info you can find online – how can you help consumers decide between them?

Cubist architecture – I made this one up too, but it definitely exists – I’m going to Google it when I get off the plane to see what there is to learn 🙂

Eurovision – could you have used voting patterns from previous years to predict this year’s result? If so, who’s going to win next year?

Desert Gospels – the books that make up the Bible weren’t actually finalised until the 4th century AD, and several of the ones that didn’t make the cut have turned up in Egyptian and Middle Eastern deserts in recent years – what can you learn about them?

4. Decide where you want to end up – how will you know when you are done?

Start at the end. You need to know where you’re going in order to work out how to get there.

Let’s take the Desert Gospels project as an example. The end could be a page on each of the Desert Gospels – explaining what’s in them, how it differs from or adds to the standard Bible, where the documents were found, and so on.

It’s essential that you define the end goal before you begin work. In the tech industry it’s called the ‘definition of done’, the set of criteria that must be satisfied in order for something to be complete. But what’s important there is not just what’s in the list of criteria – it’s also what’s not in the list. Avoid the non-essential stuff that can distract and delay you by writing down your definition of done on day 1.

5. Go to wordpress.com and set up a blog

Yeah… self-explanatory 🙂

6. Boom!

It’s go time – start learning, and post info on your site about what you’ve learnt and how you are progressing towards your end goal.

Minimum one post per week, and ten posts in total. Plus you need an ‘About’ page. Send me the link when your site is up and I’ll share it on my site. If you ask Carole nicely she will share it on CareerActually too 🙂

Ping me on Twitter @toddmgreen or via the contact form if you have questions. I’m happy to help, 4realz yo.

Good luck, and let me know how you get on!

Cheers,

~ Todd