An externship offers on-the-job experience without the preliminary hassle of submitting a resume or being screened for hire. Moreover, instead of working your way up the ladder, as you would in an entry-level job, an externship lets you get your feet wet right away by performing the position's everyday tasks. It also gives you the chance to become accustomed to the pace of an average day in the position, the industry and the company culture. For example, as an extern in a law office, you might participate in legal research, accompany lawyers to trial or pretrial negotiations with the opposition or prepare briefs. You would not be allowed to argue a case, but you would have a front-row seat to seeing how a case is properly argued by an established attorney.
In an externship, you work under an experienced, established member of the profession who is well acquainted with its mores, responsibilities and expectations. When you complete a task, you can receive feedback about your performance and measure it against accepted standards. Externs can get a feel for the personalities that excel in a particular profession. Once you've spent time around these workers, they can tell you if you are temperamentally suited for the their line of work. The financial arena, for example, is a fast-paced environment. As an extern, you might be expected to attend multiple meetings, check on several markets throughout the day and provide instant opinions and predictions on the behavior of the stock market. You'll see seasoned professionals make split-second decisions worth potentially millions of dollars and decide if you can handle the pressure.
Your extern experience is meant to introduce you to like-minded workers who might become part of your professional world in the future. Even if you decide that the profession of your externship is not for you, your experience can still be an invaluable source of contacts and even potential references. You'll meet employees, supervisors, company representatives and even other externs who may become excellent networking contacts. An externship is also a useful venue for honing your interpersonal and communication skills, which can help broaden your network even more. If you plan to do an externship in sales, you'll meet plenty of potential clients and leads.
Participating in an externship is a way to discover more not only about a profession, but also about yourself. An externship can reveal skills, habits, likes and dislikes of which you were previously unaware. In a particularly fast-paced or pressure-filled externship, you will learn to focus, discipline yourself and manage time properly, skills that are extremely valuable in any field. The mere experience of an externship, whether or not you enjoy it, can teach you more about the inner workings of the business world and help you learn to work more efficiently with others. In an advertising externship, for example, where employees often collaborate on different campaigns, you'll learn to generate ideas and evaluate the merits of others' ideas quickly. You may sit in on meetings with clients and learn how to present a campaign in the best possible light. You will not be responsible for developing an actual client campaign, but you will likely be able to contribute and see how a commercial or ad goes from idea to execution.